342 
Home Department. 
ON DISEASES OF FARM HORSES ARISING FROM 
MISMANAGEMENT. 
[Continued from page 283.] 
Overwork. 
The influence of work is clearly observed in the general con¬ 
dition of farm-horses, from the breaking to the termination of 
life; and much depends upon the amount of work given during 
the first two years whether they shall become healthy, useful 
animals, or unthrifty and weakly—a burden to themselves and to 
their owners. On well-managed farms, and where humanity 
and kindly treatment prevail, the working horses live a mono¬ 
tonous kind of life. They are sufficiently fed, and rarely over¬ 
worked; and, except perhaps during the busy tillage season, or 
catching hay or harvest time, their employment is easy, and 
diseases seldom produced. It is not uncommon to see horses 
managed in this manner performing their daily labour at twenty 
years of age with apparent ease and comfort. 
The average work of a plough-team is about eight hours a 
day, and the pace rarely exceeds a mile and a-half or two miles 
an hour. The severity of this labour will depend on the 
strength of the teams, their age, and food, as well as the nature 
of the soil and cultivation. It is mismanagement to make a 
pair of three-year-old horses perform the same amount of labour 
in the day as a pair of older horses that are staunch and ac¬ 
customed to their work. If a pair of six-year-olds can plough 
an acre of light land in a day, half an acre or two-thirds of an 
acre are sufficient for a pair of young horses to do. It is also 
folly to expect a pair of horses fed in the open fields through 
the summer to perform their work freely through the autumnal 
wheat sowing; or a pair that have been fed on straw and 
hay and roots, with only an occasional quartern of oats during 
the winter, to bustle through the busy spring tillage and turnip 
sowings as they ought. 
There is no economy in practices which compel horses to 
perform a greater amount of labour than either their strength can 
bear or their rest recruit; and hence the reason why so many are 
used up long before they reach what may be fairly considered 
as their allotted term of life. This may be estimated at fifteen 
years, but a very considerable number die or are destroyed before 
they reach half of this period. 
