STABLE MAUAGEMENI. 55 



CHAPTER IV. 

 STABLE MANAGEMENT. 



The stable may be made a wholesome, pleasant home for the 

 horse, or a wretched dungeon. Even when it is expensively built, 

 and the food unobjectionable in quality and quantity, if there is a 

 lack of proper daily care and attention, the animal wiU suffer in 

 health and condition. The horse is the most cleanly and intelligent 

 of dumb animals. In a state of nature it lives in the open air, and 

 is free from disease. In the domestic condition a perfectly sound 

 horse is the exception rather than the rule. Any one who has seen 

 a newly captured mustang, prancing and cavorting at the end of its 

 lariat, every muscle quivering with animation, would f ail to recog- 

 nize it in the sorry beast it becomes after a few years of confinement 

 in a stable, with the average treatment it is likely to receive. Mayhew 

 paints the picture in his usual glowing colors as follows : 



" Horses, when in a wild state, are gregarious, or congregate in 

 herds. Man captures such a quadruped and places it in a stable, 

 built to enforce the extrem.e of solitary confinement. The pl ain is 

 the natural abode of the herd ; on their speed depends both their 

 pleasure and safety. Man ties the domesticated horse to a manger, 

 and pays a gi'oom to enforce absolute stagnation upon innate activi- 

 ty. Before subjugation, the creature fed off the surface of the earth. 

 Man builds a house specially designed for the captive, in which the 

 com is placed on a level with the chest, and the hay is stationed as 

 high up as the head. The animal is gifted with affections ; it longs 

 to gratify their promptings ; it yearns for something upon which its 

 abundant love may gush forth — a fellow-prisoner — a goat — a dog — 

 a cat — a fowl ; no matter what, so it be some living object on which 

 may be lavished that excess of tenderness which, confined to its own 

 breast, renders being miserable. Man esteems it his primary duty to 

 clear the stable of all possible companionship ; but the creature which 

 would rejoice, were it only permitted to worship its enslaver, he rare- 

 ly approaches without a loud voic-e, a harsh word or a harsher blow, 

 announcing his presence to the captive. The inhabitant of such a 

 prison, the domesticated horse, miserably drags through a shortened 

 life, under bumaa. protection. The nearest approach it can make to 

 freedom is its period of exhausting labor. It always rejoices to quit 



