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The Pamphlet Collection of Sir Robert Stout: Volume 13

A Hint on Stabling

A Hint on Stabling

"O! you naughty boy! go into the corner and stand there with your face to the wall." I am afraid that this command has been given to me more than once when I was "naughty" many years ago. Perhaps my gentle readers were always good boys, and consequently never stood in corners with their faces to the wall, in which case they cannot, from personal experience, know how particularly disagreeable such a position is, and how intolerable it becomes if the page 24 naughty boy is not soon forgiven; for my own part I always preferred Mrs. MacStinger's treatment, and in fact I generally procured it by disobeying the cruel order, and turning round and facing my natural enemy the governess. If such treatment is unpleasant to a boy; if the face to the wall is a position almost intolerable for one hour, what must it be for weeks, months, and years to the horse, who is tied to the wall in a confined stall, seeing nothing before him but whitewash; standing on an inclined plane with the whole weight of his body bearing on the back sinews of his legs, is it wonderful to find him, when out of the stable, ready to shy at everything that approaches him. Accustomed to such very blank prospects at home, he drops into the idea that all his hopes in life are confined within the narrow bounds of the whitewashed bricks and painted boards of his stall, and like the toad out of the rock, he is not ready to enter on a more extended sphere of action without some preparation. Always assailed in the stable from behind, he is hardly in a position to meet anything, be it either danger or pleasure, face to face. Standing too, as he does in his inclined stall day after day, and night after night, he finds this "uphill work" rather more painful than romantic, and less interesting than tedious. I wish some owners of horses, and keepers of stables (livery and others), would walk out any day into a paddock, and see in what way the horses that are resting after feeding are standing, and I will venture to assert that they do not find one single horse standing with his head page 25 uphill, and that the majority are standing with their heads downhill; unless indeed a smart breeze is driving before it a drifting rain, when they will all turn their tails to the shower. Why then should we pitch our stalls so as to make our horses stand in the very position they so naturally dislike. Lameness is the greatest affliction that can befal our horses, and yet we, by careless shoeing and negligent stabling invite it in all its forms. The prevention is simple enough; put horses into loose boxes, and get them shod by educated farriers; and if we do this, the time will arrive when a swollen tendon, and a contracted hoof, will be as rare as a rich gift to a poor relation.