GRASS
—is that well-known produce of the earth, which is the proper food for horses in a state of NATURE, EASE, and INDOLENCE; but not of sufficient nutritive property for horses engaged in either SEVERE, LABORIOUS, or ACTIVE exertions. Horses taken up from grass, and put suddenly to work, labour under an immediate and perceptible disquietude; the contents of the intestines are soon evacuated in a STATE of LAXITY, the frame displays a profusion of FOUL and FŒTID PERSPIRATION, the body bespeaks its own DEBILITY, and the perseverance of a few days demonstrates its EMACIATION. To horses having been whole months in constant use and work, alternately accustomed to diurnal drudgery, and the routine of the manger, GRASS, with its conjunctive LIBERTY, must prove a sweet, a comfortable, a proper, and a healthy change: it not only, by its own attenuating property, proportionally alters the PROPERTY of the BLOOD, but affords, by the comforts of EASE and EXPANSION, a renovation of elasticity and vigour to the relaxed sinews, the exhausted spirits, and the battered frame.
To the penurious and the unfeeling (equally insensible) it is sufficient, that a horse, worn to the bone with constant work, and want of food, is "TURNED TO GRASS" in the winter, when there is none to be eaten; or during the months of July and August, when a horse loses more FLESH by persecution from flies (if not well protected by shade, accommodated with plenty of water, and an equal plenty of grass) than he can acquire by any advantage arising from LIBERTY alone; which some people seem to conceive all that is required, and that the poor animal, Camelion like, "can live upon the air." It should be recollected, that in the animal œconomy, substance only can beget substance, (see Aliment;) and no horse will be likely to accumulate flesh, or become FAT, whose means of living are poor.
Impoverished rushy moors, and lank half-rotten autumn grass, (particularly after wet summers,) will prove much more likely to produce DISEASE, than produce CONDITION. Those who turn out horses to grass with a cough upon them, particularly if from a WARM STABLE in a cold season, may expect to take them up with a short, husky, laboured asthmatic increase of the original complaint, or with tubercles formed upon the lungs; and those who turn out in the winter season, with a hope of obtaining the cure of CRACKED HEELS, or SWELLED LEGS, may probably take up with a confirmed GREASE, particularly if the constitution should lean a little to blood, and pedigree of that description.
The utility and advantages of physic were never better understood, or more clearly ascertained, than at the present moment of general improvement: experienced sportsmen, and rational observers, however doubtful they may have been, are now convinced of its propriety, and never deviate from its practice. They invariably cleanse at the end of the HUNTING SEASON, and repeat the ceremony after taking their horses up from grass, previous to getting them into condition. Let those who doubt the consistency, try the experiment, and they will be soon convinced, how little one will be enabled to stand a WINTER'S WORK with the other.