An ordinary farm colt at three or four months old is worth only thirty
or forty dollars. Two years later, with the right kind of care and
teaching, the same colt will bring four times that price. What other
farm crop will do as much?
The mother of a baby colt once died on our farm. My father felt very
badly over it; losing the old mare was misfortune enough, but the colt
was a noble-looking little fellow, highly bred. We girls had been
foster-mothers to almost everything; cats, pups, and pigs were easy,
and calves. But what of a colt? "Let's try if we can't raise him on the
bottle," said our mother. The experiments we tried with that colt were
many. We gave him "half and half" at first--a cup full of milk to one
of water. Our small cousin had once been fed on mare's milk, much to
our disgust, but it gave us ideas for our colt. Mother read somewhere
that cow's milk was not so sweet, but was richer than mare's milk. So
we patched our bits of hearsay together and made up our colt's ration
about like this:
First week: half sweet milk, half water, a teaspoonful of sugar to each
pint, ten times a day--always warm--last feeding at ten P. M.--not
very much at a time. Second and third weeks less water, six feedings a
day, warm and sweet as before. Fourth to tenth week: increase quantity
gradually, give warm--not very rich--milk three times a day. We gave
him a bottle at first with a nipple made of a goose-quill wrapped each
time with clean, soft rags. Everything about his food had to be kept
sweet. We scalded the bottle and the quill and washed them in water and
baking soda, just as mother said. Then we taught him to drink from a
pail. He followed us about like a dog and was very playful and frisky.
We fed him a little hay and oats and grass when he was old enough. My
little sister wanted us to give him less milk so that he would grow up
into a pony, but when he begged for food, she was the first to go for
his bottle. He grew up and developed just like any horse and father
said he was the easiest two-year-old he ever had to teach to work. He
paid us seventy-five dollars for the colt when he was eight months old
and ready to shift for himself with the other colts.
RAISING SHEEP
Every boy on the farm ought to have his own particular hobby in the
line of stock. It is far easier to keep account of your own if they are
entirely different from the animals raised by the other members of the
family. An account should be kept with the animals, to learn whether
they pay or not. It is only by this business-like method that the young
farmer, or the older one for that matter, can know whether his animals
are visitors or boarders.