Page:Horses and roads.djvu/201

Rh of a horse’s foot must be kept off the ground, ‘or else why does he limp when he loses a shoe?’ This settles the thing at once with the master, and he shuts up, instead of giving the thing fair consideration and investigation, and talking it over with other owners to obtain an interchange of ideas. People do not like to do this, because, as Bracy Clark said: ‘No man likes to make inquiries about horses, for that would imply a want of knowledge.’ This nail got another blow on the head lately from ‘Caractacus,’ when he said in the ‘Farm Journal’: ‘Unfortunately it forms too prominent a feature of the average Englishman’s vanity to affect to know much more about the horse than he really does.’ As a general rule, that is what is the matter with them;  but in the affair of treatment of the foot they tacitly acknowledge that stable-helpers and farriers understand it better than themselves, and so they leave these two lumps of ignorance to make arrangements between them over such a small affair, heedless of the not time-honoured maxim, ‘No foot, no horse.’ Thus, these worthies have become authorities on shoeing, to the prejudice of professors who were almost at their wit’s end to grapple with the question.

Mayhew says: ‘No shoe can give that which is dependent upon motion’—expansion is motion. ‘There are many more pieces of iron curved, hollowed, raised, and indented than I have cared to enumerate. All, however, have failed to restore health to the hoof. Some, by enforcing a change of position, may, for a time, appear to mitigate