Nimrod's remarks on the condition of hunters, the choice of horses, and their management : reprinted from the "Sporting magazine" / by C. Tongue.
- Cecil, 1800-1884.
- Date:
- [1880?]
Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: Nimrod's remarks on the condition of hunters, the choice of horses, and their management : reprinted from the "Sporting magazine" / by C. Tongue. Source: Wellcome Collection.
384/424 page 372
![1 shall conclude this subject by observing, that, although in incipient cases firing or very severe corrosive blistering may cure a bone-spavin, they are wholly inefficient after a certain time, and in cases where the lameness has been considerable. Perhaps I may attribute my not having suffered by spavins to the great attention I have paid in my purchases of horses to the proper form of the hind legs. I received a lesson on this point in very early life, and never lost sight of it after- wards. There is a particular formation of the hock joint, which, in severe work, will nearly ensure either spavins or curbs. The proper way to examine the hocks of a horse is, to stand in the front of him, and look at them, as it were, between his forelegs. SPLENTS. Perhaps I have been what is termed lucky in this respect, for I have never had a horse lame from splents but once; and that case has been already recorded in these pages, on account of its singularity in the first place, and held out as a beacon to those who summer their horses in the fields in the second. I should make it a rule never to touch a splent un- less it produced lameness, which it does not once in a hundred instances. Blistering, as I have before said, often rouses the sleeping lion, and the whole bone becomes enlarged, so as to occasion it being struck by the foot of the other leg. That stupid method, resorted to only by the ignorant, of punc- turing a splent with a shoemaker’s awl, and then hammering . it, or rubbing it with the handle of a pitchfork, is also greatly to be condemned. The greatest proof of the general harm- lessness of splents is, that they are never found on the legs of old horses, unless they have been improperly treated. wlieiicc or from wliat substance tliis great smoke could arise. Oli, reader ! you will sliriuk when T inform you, that this smoke issued from the witliers of this ])Oor horse—he having a fistula in a dreadful slate of disease, f//c vt^rt/ sluKSPs of which this iynomnl aud nrfucHny savaye had. burnt out -with a broad red-hot iron !!](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b28130479_0384.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
