PRESIDENT BERGH’s ADDRESS. 
353 
the knife, the scalpel and the saw, are the barbarous instruments 
which these merciless ruffians employ to torture the hapless ani¬ 
mal with, and astonish the humane and terrified beholder. 
The hewing of granite in the prisons of the State, or the 
congenial treadmill, are the sole occupations which their barbarity 
adapts them to. 
To put a stop to these inhumanities, as well as their kindred 
abomination—vivisection, the Society I represent has made re¬ 
peated and earnest applications for redress to the Legislature, 
through its counsel, Mr. Gerry, and if these miserable torturers 
of animals, and destroyers of valuable property are ever to be 
reformed or annihilated, it will be through the enlightening influ¬ 
ence of Veterinary Colleges like this. 
The feet of the horse are to him what the foundations are to 
a house. Let them be defective, and neither of them can stand 
long or perform the duties required of them. And yet no part 
of that invaluable animal is of half the importance as his feet. 
He may be blind, wind-broken, spavined and consumptive; but so 
long as his feet, the insensible foundations of his animal super¬ 
structure, are intact, he can be rendered useful and profitable by 
judicious patching, nailing and repairing, like to the decaying edi¬ 
fice, whose base is rocks. 
With an incredible disregard, however, of this obvious fact, 
the farrier’s first act on the entry of the animal into his shop, 
and after having saluted the friendly creature, perhaps, with a 
blow from a convenient rasp or hammer, is to commence slicing 
off huge pieces of the hoof, until, not unfrequently, the muscular 
tissues are visible ! 
Until very lately there was to be seen in almost every shop 
an infernal machine named a buttress, a sharp instrument formed 
liked a miniature shovel, with which the iconoclastic operator 
exercised his destructive vandalism. 
To the professors of Veterinary Science, here and eleswhere, 
I would make the earnest appeal, to effect the abolition of a prac¬ 
tice so manifestly absurd and ruinous. A rasp in the hands of an 
intelligent workman is nearly all that is required to level the hoof 
for the reception of the shoe, without having recourse to the 
