The illustrated horse doctor : $b being an accurate and detailed account of the various diseases to which the equine race are subjectedMayhew, Edward
Science
The illustrated horse doctor : $b being an accurate and detailed account of the various diseases to which the equine race are subjected
Mayhew, Edward
Horses -- Diseases
Such is a brief description of glanders, to cure which every now and
then pretenders arise. No medicine, however, can restore the parts
which disease has disorganized. There is no cure for glanders, which is
essentially an ulcerative disorder. Every horse being thus contaminated
should be at once destroyed: it is now lawful to do this when animals are
taken in Smithfield market; but what is just in one place is surely not
unjust in another. Moral rectitude resides on no particular spot. The
blackguards who deal in contagion, driven from the public market, now
reap a rich harvest by private sales. A chronically-glandered horse is an
actual property to these rogues. It is sold. No sooner is the money paid
and the vendor out of the way, than an accomplice appears and points out
the nature of the bargain. The unfortunate purchaser seeks advice, and
finds his worst fears confirmed. The accomplice offers to buy the horse
at a knacker's price. It is obtained; and again it is advertised as "a
favorite horse, the property of a gentleman deceased."
Any person ought by law to be empowered to give any man, driving or
riding a glandered horse, into custody. There should be appointed certain
qualified practitioners who should have authority to enter any stable at
any time. Those abominations, where numbers of glandered horses are now
stived together, whence they only are taken out to draw public vehicles
by night, would then soon cease to exist. Were glandered horses by law
condemned, men, from mercenary motives, would soon cease buying cheap life
for the purpose of working disease to utter exhaustion. Such proprietors,
were glanders declared just cause for slaughtering any horse wherever
found, would soon discover their cheap purchases to be dear bargains. It
is terrible now to witness animals, in almost the last stage of a most
debilitating malady, goaded through the public streets with cruel loads
behind them. It is horrible, when we reflect that every citizen in a
large town is, by the avarice of unscrupulous people, exposed to a most
loathsome disease, and to a most torturing death.
FARCY.
When the horse, which has been the pampered favorite in its youth, grows
old, it generally becomes the half-starved and over-worked drudge of
some equally half-starved proprietor. In the fullness of its pride and
the freshness of its strength, it had to canter under the airy burden
of my lady's figure. When the joints are stiff--when accident, disease,
and sores, have rendered every movement painful; and when its energy is
poorly fed upon the rankest provender--then the wretched animal is, by
the whip of a thoughtless hireling, forced to toil between the shafts of
some creaking cart. It is sad to watch the vehicles on a London road, and
speculate upon what has been the past fortune and will be the future fate
of the animals which propel them!
[Illustration: THE OLD FAVORITE AND THE NEW PET.]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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