WATERING.
Horses are greater epicures in water than is generally supposed, and will make a rush for some favourite spring or rivulet where water may have once proved acceptable to their palate, when that of other drinking-places has been rejected or scarcely touched.
The groom’s common maxim is to water twice a-day, but there is little doubt that horses should have access to water more frequently, being, like ourselves or any other animal, liable from some cause—some slight derangement of the stomach, for instance—to be more thirsty at one time than another; and it is a well-known fact that, where water is easily within reach, these creatures never take such a quantity at a time as to unfit them for moderate work at any moment. If an arrangement for continual access to water be not convenient, horses should be watered before every feed, or at least thrice a-day, the first time being in the morning, an hour before feeding (which hour will be employed in grooming the beast); and it may be observed that there is no greater aid to increasing their disposition to put up flesh, than giving them as much water as they like before and after every feed.
A horse should never be watered when heated, or on the eve of any extraordinary exertion. Animals that are liable to colic or gripes, or are under the effect of medicines, particularly such as act on the alimentary canal, and predispose to those affections, should get water with the chill off.
Watering in Public Troughs, or places where every brute that travels the road has access, must be strictly avoided. Glanders, farcy, and other infectious diseases may be easily contracted in this way.