The natural food of a horse is sun-cured tuft grass growing in arid regions, but a perfect imitation is the usual mixed feed of oats, chaff and bran, with the common equivalents used for varying diet. Next in value is the upland pasture of damp climates, worst is the meadow grass. The conditioning of horses in any green pasturage depends upon grain, but one should not in any feeding neglect rock salt.
If sunshine and fresh air were vital needs pit ponies would not live. Sun and air are no more necessities to a grown horse than eyesight is to a man. So one needs to examine carefully and to reason closely as to the actual value even of air and sunshine.
The range is dry, parched, and above all things hard; and from the hardest ground come the breeds of especial value by reason of sound limbs and steel-like hoofs. The hardness of ground is due to the fierce light and heat of desert climates.
Again it is known that sunlight kills the germs of nearly all diseases, provided the air can reach them.
Unless they are robbed of their coats horses are almost indifferent to the greatest known extremes of dry heat and dry cold; yet, if exposed to wind they lose weight rapidly, and are intensely susceptible to draughts. The horse's natural shelter is a wind break.
The stable
To meet all these conditions the stable in rainy climates must have a roof to keep the standings dry, and yet should be roofed with glass to let in sufficient light to kill all germs of disease.
Yet any stable, warmed by the heat of horses, however carefully cleaned, is fouled by their dung and water, and so becomes a forcing house to breed disease unless one removes the walls. There should be no walls, but the stable should be built like a Japanese house with transparent and portable screens, close fitting against draughts; which can be set up on two windward sides with every shift of the weather. By no other means can the diseases be swept away which make the stabled horse a byword for unsoundness.
Paved floor
If regions of hardest ground produce the best legs and hoofs, it does not follow that stables ought to be paved. Natural ground however hard is springy, but pavement is dead hard and slippery at that. The English horseman explains "It haint the 'unting as 'urts the 'orses 'oofs, but the 'ammer, 'ammer, 'ammer, on the 'ard 'igh road." All who have seen the strains and tensions of cowpunching and noted the perfect soundness of cow ponies will agree that it haint the 'unting. But anybody who watches English horsemen with pleasure horses has noted the exceeding care with which they are ridden on the dirt rather than on the crown of a road, on the grass by the road rather than on the highways, and on any open route across country, rather than on the roadside. They get very much less hard going than the average range horse. The draught horse may suffer from the highway, but certainly not the hunter who is equally unsound. Yet both have standings as a rule on a paved floor for not less than eighteen hours out of the average twenty-four.