Stable Notes

Feilding Star, Volume XIV, Issue 128, 18 April 1893, Page 4

Stable Notes

Build your stable on a dry site. Sunlight destroys the germs of disease. Stables should be well drained. As a single grain, oats have no superior. AH stable doors should be made to open outwards. Never let a horse eat or drink much when it is hot from work. If your horses shrink from you when you enter their stalls, do some detective work on your hired help, or — yourself. Bo regular in feeding ; feed early ; the morniug meal should bo eaten at least one honr before your horse is put to work. Professor J. Wortley Axe estimates that upwards of 18,000 horses annually die or are killed in London, and of this number about one half succumb to accidents or infirmity. When preparing horses for showyard honors it is unwise to over- feed, so as to make them "as fat as butter" ; gross over-feeding of breeding stodk cannot fail to seriously afiect the breeding powers of the subjects so treated. See that the stable is properly ventilated — a low ventilator to admit tke cold outer air, a high one by which the heated and impure atmosphere can escape. There will then be a constant, imperceptible circulation, diffusion, and purification of the air. Instantaneous photography has proved that a horse at full trot is at times entirely in the air, without any of its feet touching the ground. To comfort your horse during the fly days of summer, the following remedy will be found a success, says J. R. Campbell in Land and Water. <l Boil a quantity of the flowers and young leaves of the elder-tree for an hour or so, and then strain off the decoction into a stone bottle or other vessel, where it will keep good for years. In hot weather, when flies abound, apply this liquor to the horse's coat by means of a sponge every morning. No flies will trouble the horse all that day. The liquor dries on, but does not stain the coat. The smell it gives off no fly can stand." Whether there be anything in the recipe or not, it is at least worth trying. A colt should never bo broken. In this relation the phrase " to break " should become obsolete. Wo should never have to broak the colt any more than the boy. Both should be taught " from their youth up," and handled with patience.