Page:Horse shoes and horse shoeing.djvu/673

 hasten the ruin of the animal—and sooner or later, depending on circumstances, we have either acute or chronic navicular disease, acute or chronic laminitis, or a host of other maladies of a more or less serious character. I am of course always speaking of the anterior extremities.

This evil of paring and rasping must be looked upon as the greatest and most destructive of all that pertains to shoeing, or even to our management of the horse. Nine-tenths of the workmen who resort to this practice cannot explain its object, and those who have written books in defence of it, say it is to allow the descent of the sole and facilitate the lateral expansion of the hoof.

Fancy our gardeners cutting and rasping the bark off our fruit-trees to assist them in their natural functions, and to improve their appearance! And yet the bark is of no more vital importance to the tree than the horn of the sole, wall, and frog is to the horse's foot.

Bracy Clark has admirably delineated the changes the hoof undergoes in a short course of modern shoeing; though, always haunted by the expansion phantom, he wrongly attributed this alteration to the nails confining the lateral movements of the heels. The same transformation from health to disease can be noted in the feet of young horses whose soles are pared and hoofs embellished at some forge where shoeing is practised on 'improved principles.'

Not only is this unscientific practice injurious to the hoof and its contents, but it indirectly reacts upon the whole limb. If the foot suffers, this must share to a greater or less extent. We have but to cast our eyes on