All this, however, without a good stable, and good stable management, is of no avail.
Speaking next of feeding, Nimrod says:—Formerly wheat was given to race horses, as more nourishing than oats; but now the latter form the chief food for all descriptions of horses. Beans, however, have for some time been allowed to hunters, and when given with discretion are most beneficial. Two single handfuls in each feed of corn is the allowance for a hunter who is fed (as he ought to be) five times a day.
About eight pounds a-day of hay, or one truss a-week, is considered sufficient for a hunter that will eat five feeds of corn per day. A larger quantity is found to increase the size, consequently the weight of the carcase, to injure the wind, and destroy the digestive powers. If one handful of good hay be found in his rack, he should have no more till next stable time, when his appetite will be sharp. If given to eat his straw, the setting muzzle, in this case, must be made use of.
Hunters are not always to be fed alike: allowance should be made for the distance to covert; for when a horse has to go twelve or fourteen miles in a morning to meet hounds, he may be allowed a little more hay overnight, than if he had but four or five, as he will empty his stomach on the road, and there is reason to expect a long day. As to whether a hunter should have any water on the morning of hunting, that is a point not so much considered as it ought to be, for we should be guided by his constitution. If he is apt to scour, and throw off his meat on the road, I should recommend his having none; but if, on the other hand, he holds his meat well in him, has some distance to go, and is not called on till ten or eleven o’clock in the day, he should have six or eight swallows, or godowns, as the grooms call them, between five and six in the morning. This quantity of water, or more, is always given to the race horse on the day he runs his race, as it makes him enjoy his food, and digest it afterwards, and it is all absorbed by the time he is called upon to run. Nothing is so apt to make horses scour as change of food and water; for which reason it is advisable that a hunter should go from his own stable to meet hounds, if the distance does not exceed fifteen or sixteen miles, rather than sleep out, and be subject to the effects alluded to. If, however, he does sleep out, and is affected by the change, he should be watered before he leaves home, and have very little where he sleeps, which will in some measure counteract the evil.
Speaking of stable management, Nimrod says:—As no man can make good work without good tools, so no servant can do his duty by a stud of hunters without proper materials to go to work with. He must have a good stable, some loose boxes, and a good saddle-room with fire-place: he must have lots of horse-clothes of all descriptions, bandages, hot water, gruel, lancets, tweezers, and a few drugs—the very best old hay and corn, good exercising ground, and, above all, plenty of strength in his stable; for there are two ways of dressing a horse—one to warm him, and the other to starve him. Dressing a horse vigorously removes obstructions in the smaller vessels, promotes the circulation of the blood, and in bad weather is a substitute for exercise.
With regard to a horse coming round after a hard day, even supposing him to be in the hands of the best of grooms, that must, in some measure, depend on the stuff he is made of; but, generally speaking, he should come out about the sixth day after the severest run. If his legs have received no injury, he should come out three times in a fortnight, at least during the open weather; and he will be the better for being out twice a week if there have been no tiring days. Some horses require much more work than others; but none of them can go the pace, and continue it over a country, unless they are in strong work.
General rules cannot be individually applied; but there is one respecting a hunter which I have held inviolable; and that is, that, under all circumstances, whether the intervals between his hunting have been long or short, he should have a sweat, and go for a mile nearly at the top of his speed on the day before hunting. I have generally adopted the following plan:—
Let some heavy clothes be put on him, and, with a light weight on his back, let him go at a gentle rate six or eight times around a large field that rides a little deep, till he sweats kindly. Let him be followed to the place by a man with some dry clothes and a scraper, and, taking him into some building, or under a warm hedge, let him be well scraped, and have on his dry clothes. Then, if short of work, let him have a good gallop for a mile, and walk home. This treatment, with proper care, is unattended with any danger of catching cold, and, if followed by a proper allowance of hay and water, will give him a wonderful advantage over those horses which have not been doing what he has done, provided he drop into a quick thing with the hounds the next day. I have seen hunters led to be sweated by a boy riding a hack; but however great an advocate I may be for preserving horses’ legs by keeping weight off them as much as possible, yet a horse cannot, in my opinion, be worthy the name of a hunter if he cannot carry a boy in his exercise.
Having laid some stress upon the words, proper allowance of hay and water on the day before hunting, I will proceed to state what I consider that allowance to be. In the first place, if a horse will eat his corn in the morning without water, he should have none till he comes in from exercise, and is done up, which should be by ten o’clock at farthest. He should then have half a pail of water, and a proportion of his hay, which should not exceed, for a moderately-sized horse, ten pounds a day. He should then be shut up till four, when, before he is dressed over, he should have another half pail of water, and no more until he returns from hunting the next day, unless it be a few swallows on the morning he hunts, when his groom first comes to him. If this quantity of hay is not sufficient to satisfy his appetite, and there is an appearance in the morning of straw in the manger, as if he had been eating it, the setting-muzzle should be put on him at ten o’clock, and should remain on him for the night, but his groom should be with him by five in the morning, to relieve him. He should then have his two feeds, at an interval of an hour, and proceed to the covert at a gentle pace. If, when there, provided he have been treated in the way I have prescribed, he cannot carry his rider as he ought to do, we must conclude nature forbids it, as he will have had every assistance from art.