374 ALFALFA FARMING IN AMERICA. 
saddle. The country was extremely rough and the 
going bad. A horse must have endurance, speed, 
bottom. It is charged that alfalfa makes a horse 
soft, lacking in endurance, sweating easily. There 
is truth in the charge; we will explain it later. The 
fact is no horses could have worked better under 
the saddle than did these alfalfa-fed range horses. 
They had no other hay and for grain they had corn; 
we had nothing else for them. 
And yet it is true that the horses worked best 
when they were worked regularly and worked hard. 
If they were idle for a long time, meanwhile eating 
much alfalfa hay, they did get soft and sweated 
considerably when suddenly put to work. I do not 
attempt to explain this fact. I think that the reason 
is that the idle horses ate too much alfalfa hay, 
took into their systems several times as much pro- 
tein as their bodies needed or could use, and thus 
induced some sort of unhealthful condition of the 
body cells. It did not take them long to get hard 
under work. But it is assuredly true that idle- 
ness and excessive alfalfa feeding will make a horse 
soft. Idleness and six eggs a day will make all sorts 
of things wrong with a man, for that matter. 
That alfalfa will develop a hard horse is evidenced 
by the fact that not a few splendid race horses have 
been developed in California and elsewhere on a 
diet almost altogether composed of alfalfa hay and 
pasture. 
No Heaves nor Colie—At Woodland Farm for 
