ELEMENTS OF HIPPOLOQY. 175 



Bran should be fed either dry or steamed. A cold 

 bran-mash is about as indigestible a mess as a horse can be fed. 

 It is soft and watery and easily swallowed. The molars are 

 accustomed to hard, dry food. When food is softened it is 

 ready to swallow, from the horse's point of view, and down it 

 goes. A cold bran-mash is usually full of dry, unmoistened 

 particles; bran does not readily absorb cold water. It is dis- 

 tinctly a food that needs either cooking or the action of saliva 

 to prepare it for digestion. If it is put in the stomach cold and 

 unacted on by saliva, it will ferment and produce indigestion. 



If fed dry, it is a food slowly taken into the stomach. It 

 must be chewed to get it moist enough to be swallowed, and 

 the only fluids available are secretions of the salivary glands. 

 When bran, thus moistened, reaches the stomach, it is warm, 

 digestion has begun, and that process continues naturally. 



If fed wet, it should be steamed. A large watertight and 

 easily cleaned receptacle should be prepared expressly for this 

 purpose. The bran, mixed with salt in the proportion of one 

 ounce of salt to three pounds of bran, should be put in it, and 

 boiling water, in the proportion of two and one-half pints to 

 three pounds of bran, poured over it. It should then be tightly 

 covered with woolen blankets, and allowed to steam for fifteen 

 or twenty minutes. It should be fed hot, and the receptacle it 

 was cooked in at once cleaned and sunned. After it has been 

 eaten, the mangers should be cleaned thoroughly. Bran-mash 

 sours quickly, and, aside from being a good culture for disease 

 germs, the odor of sour bran is distasteful and makes other food 

 mixed with it not appetizing. 



For horses in good health, bran, preferably dry, should be 

 fed one day in seven, and in the evening. Cooked mashes are 

 food for sick or ailing horses. 



Horses should have salt, in rock form, in their feed- 

 boxes at all times. In addition, fine table salt, a heaping table- 



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