A treatise on the horse : its diseases, lameness, and improvement : in which is laid down the proper method of shoeing the different kinds of feet ... / by William Osmer.
- Date:
- 1830
Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: A treatise on the horse : its diseases, lameness, and improvement : in which is laid down the proper method of shoeing the different kinds of feet ... / by William Osmer. Source: Wellcome Collection.
Provider: This material has been provided by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. The original may be consulted at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.
29/296 (page 5)
![Chap. /.] WEARS BUT LITTLE, UNSHOD. support great weights without breaking. We shall come presently to show how these qualities may be impaired, or entirely lost, by bad management. [At this place it is worth our while to stop and in- quire whence the custom of shoeing horses arose, and how it should prevail in one part of the world and not in another. In Asia, the original country of the horse kind, they do not shoe their horses at all, because the hoof acquires a tough and firm tex- ture from the dryness of the soil, and really stand in no need of any artificial defence. Further to aid nature in the re-production of horn of the most desirable texture and hardness, every horseman carries a rasp to shorten the toe and take off the ragged of the quarters of the foot, which would otherwise grow too luxuriant, and the crust would most certainly split. On the other hand, horses reared in the Netherlands, for example, or in our Lincolnshire, on wet or moist lands and a humid atmosphere, will naturally have a wider and weaker foot, the consequence of its being replete with cartilage, and therefore capable of contrac- tion by heat, and of expansion by being exposed to damp or wet. Iron defence.—Seeing the great difference that existed in the texture, or hardness of the horn in horses’ feet, man, in his wisdom—as the surface of the earth changed, found himself obliged to add another defence, besides the natural one, to preserve the crust of such feet as were weak, and therefore not so well able to support](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b21987713_0029.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
