OBSERVATIONS ON INJURIES, ETC., AMONG ARMY HORSES. 67 
bare ground every time the horse lies down. Bedding is 
always reported to be a scarce article ; it may be, or it may 
not be, yet we can manage to supply our private horses, but 
what does it matter in troop horses? Who objects to seeing, 
day after day, such an unsightly appearance as ninety per 
cent, of abraded hocks ? We point it out, and there our duty 
ends. 
Injuries by cutting on the inside the fore-leg by the oppo- 
* site hoof, not by the shoe or clench, are obviated by con- 
stantly wearing leathern guards. Attention to shoeing does 
not, as a rule, rectify cases of this description. Extensive 
wounds in the knees are of rare occurrence, but superficial 
ones, from striking the front walls, are more frequent. 
Sometimes they result from hitting the mud walls whilst 
jumping. 
We witnessed a case of partial tenotomy occur when a 
horse was jumping a three-foot wall at riding drill. He 
landed all right on his fore feet, but from some cause or other 
the toe of one hind foot came down heavily on the fore leg 
of the same side, cutting through the skin and three parts 
through the tendon of the flexor pedis perforatus, four inches 
above the fetlock joint, in a transverse direction. Extreme 
lameness was the immediate result, and total incapacity for 
military service the ultimatum. Another horse, not Govern- 
ment property, got out of his box, and in galloping over 
some uneven waste ground, overgrown with grass, brought his 
off hind leg forcibly on to the exposed end of a broken wine- 
bottle that was sticking in the soil. Both tendons and the 
long superior sessamoideal ligament were entirely severed, 
and the bone itself bore the mark of the bottle. The wound 
was transversely cut four inches above the fetlock. The 
haemorrhage was extensive, the blood-vessels having been 
divided. As will be imagined, the horse was shot. 
Wounds of the feet have arisen from treading on the sharp 
loose stones that lie about neglected Macadamized roads — we 
do not mean roads that are not used, but those that are 
not repaired, as they should be, by frequent watering and 
rolling during the hot and dry months. One piece of 
road, say 150 yards, is travelled over at least four times a 
day by more than three hundred horses, therefore it is being 
continually hacked up by about 5,000 horseshoes daily. 
Such has been the case for many months, and the road now 
is perfectly dangerous. Duty drew attention to this thing 
last year, and it was rectified ; duty pointed it out this year, 
but the evil remains. In this part of India we do not get 
rains periodically; the whole summer is dry, so that roads 
