96 
M. CH. MARTIN. 
capacity of the stomach and the intestines, and gives the animal a 
large belly. The person who buys such a horse, to make of him 
either an elegant saddle horse or handsome coach horse, wants to 
reduce that unsymmetrical abdomen—and to do it reduces the ration 
of hay and of straw. At the farmer’s the animal had 15 kilo¬ 
grams of hay and as much of straw daily; they are reduced to 5 
kilograms—and the horse which at each meal before had 5 kilo¬ 
grams receives now only two kilograms, with which, with the 
straw and oats, he is to fill up the capacity of his stomach of 15 
litres. 
All that food taken will scarcely fill two-thirds of his 
stomach, and he will yet be hungry, as that terrible sensation 
ceases only, according to Mr. Colin, when the stomach has 
received all it can contain . This horse, whose stomach is incom¬ 
pletely full, who is hungry, and has nothing left in his manger 
or his rack, will begin to bite them, gnawing them; by powerful 
contractions of the flexor muscles of the neck and head he will 
try to tear and pull them to pieces; and in these contractions the 
pharynx will be depressed and the cribbing produced, as I have 
already demonstrated. 
It is thus that healthy and strong horses, and big eaters, have 
become cribbers and formed the habit from no other cause than 
the insufficiency of the volume of their rations. 
Nervous and well bred horses become cribbers by idleness : it 
seems that it is by tediousness, by impatience of the inactivity to 
which they are subjected, that they bite and gnaw the mangers, 
racks, stalls, ropes of the halters, etc.,; and it is always in mak¬ 
ing energetic tractions upon these objects, in contracting the 
flexor muscles of the head, that they depress the pharynx and 
succeed in cribbing. 
VIII. 
The horse which is a confirmed cribber, does not crib while at 
grass or when his food is placed in front of him on the ground. 
If he wished to do so he could not, for two reasons, 1st, because 
in that attitude the sterno hyoideus and thyroideus muscles are so 
relaxed that their maximum of contraction could not depress the 
