Page:Horses and roads.djvu/105

 Rh down to the seaboard, and in some cases making a journey of several hundreds of miles, and they load back again; yet they never wear out their hoofs. The writer speaks from experience; for it has been his lot to own and work hundreds of animals at a time in more than one of these countries;  and if shoeing could have helped him in the slightest he would most certainly have resorted to it. No man could see four or five hundred animals incapacitated from work without seeking such a simple remedy; but it was never wanted, and many years of experience of this kind have naturally convinced him that horses work better, and can travel further, without shoes than with them.

Nor is this all. Unshod horses enjoy almost a total immunity from diseases of the feet and legs. Side-bones, sandcrack, seedy toe, ringbone, thrush, and quittor were never seen in the writer’s stables. Spavins, curbs, splints, and windgalls were very rare. Thrush is effectually cured by removing the shoe from any horse that suffers from it. Professor Coleman said that ‘the frog must have pressure, or become diseased;’ and Mr. Douglas says that ‘contraction prevents a supply of blood from reaching the sensitive frog that produces the insensible frog; and so, becoming useless for the purpose nature intended it, instead of coming to horn it oozes out a noxious-smelling fluid.’ The unshod horse has frog pressure;  so, unless he should stand upon rotten litter, thrush he cannot get. Quittor is caused by pricking with a nail, or by the