Dismount when there is a check, if only for an instant; and, when there is time, shift your saddle an inch back or forward, the first for preference. This will prove a great refreshment to your mount.
Be uniformly kind and courteous to everybody. If you chance to distinguish yourself by good riding, or good fortune, make no fuss about it, or look for adulation. Always carry a yard or two of twine, a pick, and a few shillings along with you; there may be uses for all.
When riding home, if you do ride, grasp the first opportunity of getting your horse some warm gruel, and take him through a shallow ford or pond to wash the mud from his legs and belly. When you get him to his stable do not allow him to be tormented by elaborate grooming; see that he is given an abundance of straw to roll in, and a good bucket of linseed tea to drink; have his ears dried by pulling them, bandage his legs with flannel, and give him an abundance of fresh air, which is of far more consequence to an exhausted hunter than either food or water. I greatly disapprove of admitting draughts, especially thorough ones—but it is a dire mistake to cram a horse into a close stable, with every chink stopped up, and then put a huge quantity of hay and oats before him. Bad air and improper feeding soon do their work. Some valuable animal is taken ill, a farrier is sent for, he tries bleeding to stop the terrific action of the heart, and before morning the horse is dead.
I shall have something useful to say on this and kindred subjects in my chapter on “Doctoring,” later on.
THOROUGHLY OBNOXIOUS.
CHAPTER XX.
SHOEING.
There are three points concerning this important subject on which I should like to thoroughly convince my readers. Firstly, that the theory, sometimes put forward, of dispensing with shoes for horses that are intended to work in paved cities and over rough roads, is a fallacious one; secondly, that the shoeing done at ordinary forges is practically all wrong; and, thirdly, that there is nothing at all derogatory in going down one’s-self to the blacksmith’s, in company with the animal to be shod, and not only giving directions about the way in which it will be most advisable to do it, but standing by to make certain that it is actually done. Common errors among smiths are these; cutting down the frog until it cannot possibly come in contact with the ground; paring the sole, until it is either bedewed with blood, or so thin that the effort to walk on it causes the horse to wince; opening the “bars” which join the frog to the outer wall of the foot; putting on unnecessarily heavy shoes; having a strong predilection in favour of calkins; rasping down the wall of the foot to fit the shoe, instead of making the shoe to fit the foot; and removing too much of the heel horn. These faults proceed, as a rule, more from ignorance than obstinacy, and it would therefore be a good and wise thing if every farrier were to be made thoroughly acquainted with the anatomy of the horse’s foot and leg: he would then perceive what dire mischief he was in reality doing while pursuing the ordinary stereotyped course which his father and grandfather probably followed before him.
To look at this list of errors in review. First of all, the frog should never be interfered with; to pare it with a knife is ruinous; it ought to touch the ground instead of being prevented from doing so: nature intended that it should. It retains the hoof in proper shape at the heels, prevents the tendency to slip, and in fact acts as the natural buffer of the foot, giving it strength, security, and elasticity, while its toughness enables it to travel over the roughest country without shrinking or pain. It wards off concussion, being surrounded by lateral cartilages which may be described as yielding sidewalls, and is the contrivance supplied by nature for preserving the superimposed structures from injury or passing hurt. Cutting into the frog is, I am most firmly convinced, one of the chief causes of thrush, and nothing can more clearly prove this than the fact that diseased and wasted frogs, and thrushes of long and obstinate standing, have been known to become completely cured by the adoption of a proper system of shoeing—one that brought the frog not only near the ground, but actually on it.