210 WEST CORNWALL AGRICULTURAL REPORT. 
sufficiently know, and therefore cannot adequately appreciate, the 
good qualities of our quadruped dependents. Natural history, 
however, exhibits, in a variety of most affecting incidents, qualities 
in brutes which ought at once to endear them to us, and to awaken 
in our hearts a kind solicitude for their well being, and an anxi- 
ous concern to afford them every opportunity of illustrating and 
improving those charities of their social nature which powerfully 
attract them to each other and which bind them to man when 
he does not savagely throw impediments in the way of their in- 
tercourse with him. In this respect we may learn from these 
creatures 
“ Many a good 
And useful quality, and virtue too. 
Rarely exemplified among ourselves ; 
Attachment never to be weaned, or changed 
By any change of fortune, proof alike 
Against unkindness, absence, and neglect ; 
Fidelity, that neither bribe nor threat 
Can move or warp ; and gratitude for small 
And trivial favours, lasting as the life, 
And glistening even in the dying eye.” 
This is no overcharged picture ; and if any one doubts its truth, 
let him read “ Youatt’s Obligation and Extent of Humanity to 
Brutes,” and he will then acknowledge that 
** The heart is hard in nature, and unfit 
For human fellowship, that is not pleas’d 
With sight of animals enjoying life. 
Nor feels their happiness augment his own.” 
There is another young animal that, during this inclement sea- 
son, particularly requires the care of the farmer — the colt ; and 
of all unnecessary cruelty to which the horse is subject in the 
different situations in which he may be placed, none is so preg- 
nant with mischief as that which arises from the miscalculating 
system of economy that denies him the food and shelter he re- 
quires in the earlier stages of his existence, particularly during the 
winter months. It was but a few days since that my attention 
was directed to a couple of colts exposed in the open field, with 
scarcely a tree or hedge to shelter them from the northern blast' 
and having only a small quantity of straw and a few turnips allowed 
them for food. The following night there was a severe snow- 
storm, in which every living creature looked around for shelter; 
but, alas ! the poor colts found none. The care they so much 
needed was denied at the proper moment ; and it was afterwards 
bestowed in vain : for though they were taken into a warm sta- 
ble, and received every possible attention, yet one of them died ; 
and the survivor is a poor dispirited creature, listlessly dragging 
