CAEE AND MANAGEMENT OF ANIMALS 869 



ten weeks, a bread-and-milk diet should gradually give way 

 to more substantial food, as oatmeal porridge and thin 

 biscuits, fed dry, but not too hard to be dealt with by the 

 temporary teeth. EUenberger and Hofmeister have come 

 to the conclusion that rice and milk are chiefly digested in 

 the intestines, and that the rapidity with which the dog 

 swallows his food precludes any sufiicient action of the 

 saliva to make the required change in the starch ; hence it 

 is desirable as the animal grows older to give such a pro- 

 portion of dry food as will compel him to masticate and 

 insalivate it, thereby developing his digestive powers for a 

 mixed diet in adult life. 



Quite the majority of puppies acquire nematode worms 

 during the first four months of life, and breeders commonly 

 drench them with santonine and castor-oil, or cascara 

 sagrada, syrup of buckthorn, or other simple vermifuges, as 

 soon as any check to development is observed. The ex- 

 ceptions to this rule are to be found among those whose 

 object is to produce the smallest animals and the survival 

 of the unfittest. 



As to the feeding of dogs when adult, there is great 

 variety of opinion and practice, it being held by those who 

 consider the dentition as indicative of the food that should 

 be given, that meat should form a considerable proportion 

 of the ration, while those who desire dogs for their com- 

 panionship chiefly, would confine them to a diet almost 

 exclusively farinaceous. Hounds and hunting dogs are 

 generally fed with oatmeal porridge, with various pro- 

 prietary biscuits, and with the flesh of horses and cattle 

 which have been killed on account of some infirmity, or 

 died of disease. The fitness or otherwise of the latter is 

 usually decided by the huntsman, and ill consequences are 

 but rarely traceable to such food. The amount of flesh 

 food allowed will bear some relation to the work required, 

 and the keenness of scent ; it being generally thought that 

 dogs have a keener olfactory sense when not debauched by 

 flesh food in abundance. 



The dog is a most accommodating animal in the matter 



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