Page:Horses and roads.djvu/36

 20 shoe. Cowdung is supposed by these ignorant people to be emollient, because it is soft; but everything that glitters is not necessarily gold, and cowdung instead of being an emollient, is a powerful irritant;  and so between ‘ointment’ and ‘stopping’ they are using their utmost endeavours, in surrounding the hoof on all sides with everything that ignorance and stupidity can devise (up to the present time),.

As soon as the horse is taken, as a colt, from his natural state into bondage, every one seems to consider that his mother Nature has nothing more to do with his future career. Everything then is carried on by them without once casting a thought on the dominion which she still maintains over him, equally with all her other creatures. Some others of the servants of man are less meddled with than this one, who is, at the same time, the most costly and the most generally useful—here in England, at least. It has been well said that ‘the history of almost every horse in this kingdom is a struggle to exist against human endeavours to deprive it of utility.’ This is forcible language, but it is the naked truth. Another authority says: ‘Strange to say, he frequently suffers as much from ill-advised kindness as he does from cruelty.’ This last observation applies to the English farmer, only in so far that, whilst wishing to be excessively kind to his horses, he is often unwittingly laying himself open to censure from want of having duly considered how to treat them. No one can possibly accuse him