310 LIFE WITH THE TROTTERS. 



portance. In this connection toe-weights come in play. I 

 would rather a horse would go without the weights than 

 with them. The great trouble with toe-weights is that people 

 use them when there is no necessity, and nine times out of 

 ten have them heavier than they need to be. I use toe- 

 weights a great deal; if I have a horse that has to wear over 

 a fourteen-ounce shoe, unless he has an extremely large 

 foot, I put on a toe-weight. I think there is less strain on a 

 horse's leg with a very light toe-weight and a light shoe than 

 there would be with the weight of shoe you would have ta 

 put on the horse without the toe-weight. 



There has been of late years a good deal of attention 

 given to shoeing horses with a pad made of leather or some 

 other substance, and the practice has its opponents and 

 advocates. The first man that I ever saw use anything of 

 that kind was Dan Mace. One of the strong arguments 

 against a pad on a horse' s foot is that it is unnatural to close 

 up the bottom of the foot and keep the air and moisture 

 from it. Granted this is so, it is not the only unnatural 

 thing that we do with horses or ourselves. When I first saw 

 a pad in use it struck me as being unnatural, too. I once 

 had a horse sent to me for training that seemed stiif and 

 sore, and at the first glance I thought he had been found- 

 ered. I showed him to Mace, and he said: "Bring him 

 over to my shop in Broadway and I'll show you what ails 

 Mm." Upon arriving there with the horse Mace ordered 

 his shoes taken off in front, told the blacksmith to cut out 

 the rough sole in the bottom of his feet, and there we found 

 what people term corns; the whole surface of this horse's 

 foot was bruised and congested until it was about the color 

 of a piece of liver. Upon examining his hind feet I dis- 

 covered, much to my surprise, the same state of affairs. 

 Mace ordered the horse sent to his stable, had his feet put 

 in warm water for thirty minutes twice a day for three or 

 four days, and at night he applied a poultice of boiled tur- 

 nips and bran, having the turnips put on warm. When I 

 asked him why he used turnips instead of oil-meal he 



