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years, and live actively and usefully during three-fourths of this period. 'All authorities,' he says, 'now admit that animals should live five times as long as it takes them to reach maturity. A dog, which is at its full growth when between two and three years old, is very aged at twelve years. Horses do not, unless their growth is forced, reach their full prime until they are seven or eight years old, which by the same law leaves them to live some thirty years longer. When these facts are kept in mind, together with these other facts that three-fourths of our horses die or are destroyed under twelve years old, that horses are termed aged at six' [he should have said eight], old at ten, very old when double that number of years, and that few of them but are laid up from work a dozen times a year, the viciousness of a system which entails such misery and destruction of life cannot be too strongly commented upon.' If we take the age of three years as that at which horses begin to work, and twelve as that at which they are worn out, it follows that the period of their efficiency is shorter by at least fourteen years than it should be. In other words, the nation has to buy three horses when it ought to buy only one, and thus upwards of 200,000,000l. are spent every twenty-one years in the purchase of horses when 68,000,000l. ought to suffice. The loss, therefore, to the nation is at least 135,000,000l. in twentyone years.

If this were all, the question would surely be most serious; but it is not all. Unless the facts thus far stated can be set aside, our horses work on the average seven or eight years; but how do they work? The collective experience of the country will answer that the work is done at the cost of frequent interruptions, and with an amount of discomfort and pain which often becomes agony. It is easy to say that much of the evil must be laid to the charge of grooms and stable-men; and perhaps the censures dealt out to these men are not undeserved. They are, at least, outspoken. In the last century Lord Pembroke spoke of grooms as being 'generally the worst informed of all persons living. No other servant,' says Mr. Mayhew, 'possesses such power, and no domestic more abuses his position. It is impossible to amend the regulation of any modern stable without removing some of this calling, or overthrowing some of the abuses with a perpetuation of which the stable servant is directly involved.' In this state of things the most humane of masters becomes, he adds, an unconscious tyrant to the brute which serves him so well. It is a miserable fact that grooms on their own responsibility are in the habit of administering secretly to horses medicines the cost of which they pay themselves. It may fairly be said that in every case the remedy is ill-judged, and creates worse mischief than that which it is designed to remove. Among these medicines arsenic, antimony, and nitre seem to be the favourites; but the list of remedies is not ended with these. The experience of ages, if it has failed to do more, has impressed on them the fact that the chief source of the sufferings of horses is to be found in the foot. The suspicion that

No. 612 (No. CXXXII. x. s.)

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the foot is not treated rightly by the traditionary method never enters their minds; and they deal with the limb not from a knowledge of its anatomy, structure, and purpose, but in accordance with the popular notions, which are, in plain speech, outrageously absurd. In profound ignorance that the hoof is porous, they apply hoof-ointments, which answer to cement plastered on a wall. If these were in constant use, Mr. Douglas asserts emphatically that not a morsel of sound horn would remain at the end of six months on the horses, and shoeing would become an impossibility. If the groom be told that he is thus preventing the internal moisture from reaching the outer surface and the air from circulating inwards, his only answer is an incredulous laugh. His conviction is that the hoof should not come into contact with hard material, and that the horse can be best fitted for his work by having his feet smeared with tar, beeswax, or tallow, and by resting always on a heap of litter in the stable. It would be of little use to cite Lord Pembroke as declaring that the constant use of litter makes the feet tender and causes swelled legs; moreover, it renders the animals delicate. Swelled legs may be frequently reduced to their proper natural size by taking away the litter only, which, in some stables, where ignorant grooms and farriers govern, would be a great saving of bleeding and physic, besides straw.' 'I have seen,' he adds, by repeated experiments, legs swell and unswell by leaving litter or taking it away, like mercury in a weather glass; and his experience is confirmed by the general condition of troopers' horses, in contrast with those of their officers, which are bedded down all day.

But if there are evils for which grooms are in large measure directly responsible and the abolition of which they would beyond doubt stoutly resist, there are others in which masters are not less blameworthy than their men, and from which the public generally as well as the animals are constant sufferers. The work of the horse is that of dragging and carrying; and the aim of the owner should be the accomplishment of this work with the utmost possible sureness and with the fewest accidents. Serious and fatal injuries may be the result of stumblings and slippings not less than of actual falls; and the premature wearing out of horses by excessive straining of their sinews and muscles is a direct pecuniary loss to the owners, although few of them seem to realise the true significance of the fact. These evils are to be seen everywhere, and they affect horses kept for the purpose of pleasure and ostentation almost as much as those which spend their days in a round of monotonous drudgery. A horse should not be obliged to work in going down a hill; but, in fact, they are subject to the severest strain just when they ought to have none, if they are harnessed to springless carts or waggons without breaks. Farm horses suffer with terrible severity from this cause: but the horses used in carrying trades and by railway companies undergo a more cruel ordeal. Improvements in the break power of waggons used on roads, which might greatly lessen the mischief, are not made,

and hence the horses are seldom free from diseases more or less serious, which may be traced directly to constant slipping and shaking over slippery pavements. Among ignorant owners, blind to their own interests, there is an impression that 'the work which kills one horse will bring in money enough to buy another;' but experience has sufficiently shown the fallacy of this theory, whether the overtaxed slave be a horse or a human being. In towns and cities the roads are, and must be, paved, and the pavings at present are variously of stone, wood, or asphalte, where the road is not macadamised. These pavements have, it would seem, each its own peculiar dangers for the horses which use them; and each has thus become a fruitful source of controversy. If any one method be likely to supersede the rest, the victory will probably be for the asphalte; but horses are found to slip seriously upon it, and the falls so caused are, we are told, of a graver kind than those on pavements of other sorts. All the proprietors of cabs, omnibuses, and railway vans have, it is said, protested in a body against its use, but scarcely, it would seem, to good purpose. Fresh contracts have been signed for pavements of asphalte, and others will probably follow. In the meanwhile horses have to pass, perhaps in a single morning, from macadamised roads to roads paved with asphalte, wood, or stone-in other words, over roads made of widely differing materials, which call in each case for a different action of the foot. On the other hand, the hoof is supposed to be protected by shoes, the varieties of which are legion; and thus the controversy has been brought to a singular issue. On one side it is urged that there should be a uniform system of paving enforced on all towns, so that horses should no longer pass from a less slippery road to one that is more slippery; on the other the contention is that the true remedy lies not in uniformity of paving, but in the discovery of a shoe which shall effectually prevent the horse from slipping anywhere. The former alternative is visionary; the latter has been, and perhaps it may be said still is, the object aimed at by some who have a thorough acquaintance with the structure of the horse, and the most disinterested wish to promote his welfare. We may therefore safely pay no heed to the lamentations of those who believe that the difficulty in riding or driving through the London streets arises from the variety of the pavements in use,' and that if we had a uniform kind of pavement, a shoe for universal use would be quickly invented.' We may please ourselves with fancying that 'the ingenuity of man would devise horseshoes to travel over glass, were glass the only pavement in use.' The main question is, whether mankind after all has not been forestalled in this invention; and it is absolutely certain that those who have laboured most conscientiously to improve the shoeing of horses have striven especially to secure for them the power of moving safely over materials of many kinds. These men have been convinced that the traditional methods overload the foot of the horse with iron, and that the modes of fastening on this iron interfere with, if not altogether obstruct, the

processes of nature. The efforts of all have been directed towards diminishing the weight of iron, and this has led them to the conclusion that the less the natural foot is interfered with, the better. M. la Fosse thus inferred that one half of the ordinary shoe was unnecessary, and that nothing more was needed than a tip on the front half of the foot. Unfortunately he directed that the heel should be pared, thus making it weaker, and he fastened on his tip, which had about six inches of iron in its entire length, with eight nails. He was thus inserting wedges, amounting in the aggregate from one to one and a half inches in thickness, in six inches of horn, thus squeezing it into the space of five or even four inches, and killing it from the clenches downwards and outwards.' It is strange that veterinary surgeons who have clearly comprehended the mischief thus caused have failed to draw the logical inference from their premisses. Mr. Douglas was aware that the crust of the horse's foot resembles in its natural state a number of small tubes, bound together by a hardened, glue-like substance, and he compares it to a mitrailleuse gun with its many barrels soldered together. By his way of nailing M. la Fosse was reducing the size of each tube by one sixth, or rather was entirely closing those nearest the nails and compressing those that lie halfway between each pair of nails. He was in this respect aggravating the mischief of the ordinary shoe, which commonly has seven nails; and this ensured dryness and brittleness of hoof. But the circulation of fluid through the pores of the hoof is not the only natural process which modern shoeing interferes with. In his work on the horse's foot Mr. Miles illustrates the expansion and contraction which always take place in its natural state when it is set down on and lifted from the ground. The subject was a horse nine years old, which had the shoe removed for the purpose of the experiment. 'The unshod foot was lifted up, and its contour traced with the greatest precision on a piece of board covered with paper. A similar board was then laid on the ground; the same foot was then placed upon it, and the opposite foot held up whilst it was again traced. The result was that it had expanded one eighth part of an inch at the heel and quarters.' Over two inches on each side of the centre of the toe no expansion had taken place, the tracings showing that the expansion was only lateral. It would follow that a shoe intended to give full play to this process must be confined to the part where no expansion takes place; but Mr. Miles adhered to the form of the ordinary shoe, although he reduced to three the number of nails by which it was fastened. The object of this process of expansion and contraction is to give the animal a firmer hold on the soil, and to enable him, where this is thick, slimy, or sticky, to withdraw the foot easily on contraction. This purpose is necessarily defeated when the whole foot is armed with iron.

No one has condemned the mischievous working of the existing system more strongly than Mr. Mayhew, who refuses to allow that the body of the horse was made stronger than his legs and feet, and

holds that these, if left to themselves, must be adequate to the tasks imposed on them. In his belief it is amongst the foremost physiological truths that Nature is a strict economist,' and that man has for ages laboured to disarrange parts thus admirably adjusted. No injury, no wrong, no cruelty, can be conceived, which barbarity has not inflicted on the most generous of man's many willing slaves.' But although he has thus seen the folly of contending against those organisations which govern the universe,' he still thought that the employment of some sort of shoe might not lie open to this charge. Shoes of some sort may give to the horse the freedom which is essential for the health of the foot, although he insists that all the shoes thus far used are lamentable failures. There are,' he says, many more pieces of iron curved, hollowed, raised, and indented than I have cared to enumerate. All, however, have failed to restore health to the hoof. Some by enforcing a change of position may for a time appear to mitigate the evil; but none can in the long run cure the disorder under which the hoof evidently suffers.' Such language, it might be thought, could come only from one who had discarded the use of shoes altogether. All, however, that Mr. Mayhew has done is to point the way to the road which he was not prepared to take. But the experience of Miles and Mayhew, La Fosse, Charlier, and Douglas, seems to lead by necessary logical inference to one conclusion only. If the working of the traditionary system leaves the horse a wreck almost before he has reached his prime, if the lessening of the weight of iron and of the number of nails used in fixing the iron has been followed by direct and important benefits in every instance, if even those who hold that a horse must be shod have discovered that that which they look on as a protection to the fore feet is merely harmful to the hind feet, is it possible to stifle the suspicion that this insignificant remnant of a system so fruitful in mischief may have no magic power, and, in short, that the horse may do just as well without them?

This conclusion has been courageously avowed and most ably enforced by a writer calling himself Free Lance' in his recently published work on Horses and Roads :' and to say the least, it is time that the whole question should be fully and impartially considered. It affects the wealth of the nation, and on it depend both the usefulness and the comfort of a race of noble animals which are indispensable to our prosperity. The force of prejudice may be great, and a widespread traditional system may not be soon or easily overthrown; but it cannot for a moment be supposed that Englishmen generally will assume with reference to it an attitude of unreasoning and obstinate antagonism. Fear probably will be found to supply a restraining motive more powerful than open illwill. Many who think that the new theory may look well enough on paper will doubt its value in practice, and will regard their own horses as exceptions to which it cannot apply. With a strange ignorance of fact, they will insist that unshod horses may move safely over smooth

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