Tobias
One of American history’s earliest analogies related to horse care appeared in 1758, when Benjamin Franklin, in The Way to Wealth, cautioned readers about the importance of attention to details:
“For want of a nail, the shoe was lost; For want of a shoe the horse was lost; For want of a horse the rider was lost; For want of a rider the battle was lost; For want of a battle the Kingdom was lost; And all for the want of a horseshoe nail.”
Attention to detail is still important in horse care. Owners two centuries ago were seeking advice for many of the same issues faced today, including the ‘gripes’ (colic), worms, inflammation, a dull coat and demeanor, and soundness. The difference between then and now was in a paucity of skilled veterinary expertise and trepidation in regards to those who offered it.
“You had better kill your horse by your own experiments than call in a man of no ability who would finish the business in the same way and make out a long bill in the bargain,” warned Joseph Pardon in an 1836 edition of The Sportsman. “A veterinary surgeon of acute perception and sound judgment I regard as a valuable member of society.” But he added one that was rarely within the reach of the average horseman.
So instead, while an exuberant reliance on laudanum and leeches to cure a host of ailments is probably best left to the past, there are nuggets of advice that the modern owner may give serious consideration.
A Garden of Options
Carrots and potatoes were not only a nineteenth-century garden staple to the kitchen but also the stable, where they were fed as a ‘gentle purge’ in response to equine constipation.
“As the hunter is highly fed, kept in a warm stable, and goes through a severity of exertion of which the horse would be utterly incapable under other circumstances, so he is subject to casualty and disease; further, being fed for a considerable period on dry food he frequently experiences constipation of the bowels,” cited Pardon. “Therefore, whenever a frost happens to set in, a gentle dose of physic will be found serviceable. Where a feed of carrots is given, physic will not be so often required. Carrots (or potatoes) if occasionally given, will operate as a gentle purge but will not take a horse off its feed.”
Markham's Masterpiece cover
Book by Gervase Markham
Root vegetables in general were considered beneficial to the nineteenth-century horse’s diet, including boiled or steamed beets, parsnips, pumpkins, and yams.
Interestingly, modern veterinarians like Dr. Bill Vandergrift in Versailles, Kentucky, have lectured on using beet pulp-based feed for treating intestinal inflammation issues like Leaky Gut Syndrome: “Because when you feed beet pulp, it ferments in the hindgut and produces organic acids which act as food for intestinal cells, helping the intestine regenerate faster. Also, it’s low starch and low sugar. With intestinal inflammation, you don’t want a lot of sweet feed.”
Much like Dr. Vandergrift’s modern antipathy to sweet feed for horses suffering from intestinal inflammation, in 1856, Scottish veterinary surgeon Dr. John Stewart, author of The Stable Book: Being a Treatise on the Management of Horses, noted that, for horses off their feed, “Bran has no nutriment; its laxative properties can not be true since bran is constipating to dogs. A shilling’s worth of oats is more nourishing that a shilling’s worth of bran.”
Then as now, feeding multiple small meals was advised. For most horses, Dr. Stewart suggested five daily feedings (to include raw carrots) at 6 a.m., 9 a.m., 1 p.m., 5 p.m. and 8 p.m., totaling roughly 12-16 pounds of grain (oats and beans) and 12 pounds of hay. In the winter he suggested boiling the last meal and adding turnips.
“A workhorse getting between eight to twelve pounds of grain may have four pounds deducted for every five pounds of carrots he receives.” For farm, cart or coaching horses, he suggested feeding turnips that per 100 pounds would equal the “nutritional value of 22 pounds of hay.”
For horses in “laborious work”, he recommended adding barley to each meal in a ratio of 6:3:3 (oats to beans to barley) plus hay. Barley, beans, and oats were commonly fed to horses, as were hempseed and linseed.
A half-pint of linseed oil, cited in The Sportsman, Vol. 1, “administered early in the morning upon an empty stomach and repeated in three or four days, the third dose administered after the lapse of a similar period,” was an anthelmintic “as sure and deadly a poison to the worm or bot as calomel but not injurious to the horse.” (Calomel, i.e., mercury chloride powder, was used in the nineteenth century as a purgative and to kill bacteria, but often at the expense of its recipient’s kidneys and central nervous system).
Over the last decade, omega-3 supplements have grown in popularity in support of equine joint and dermal health, and to aid in digestion. One option has been through feeding fish oil, albeit spurring debate over giving a non-vegetable product to an herbivore (the horse).
What constituted a proper herbivore diet was less an issue to earlier generations. Horses living near the sea in England not only saw diets supplemented with dried and ground seaweed but during “covering season” stallions were fed cows’ milk. During Iceland’s harsh winters, ponies were fed dried fish, and in the East Indies, Dr. Stewart wrote, “meat was boiled to rags to which is added grain and butter,” and “sheep heads were boiled for horses during campaigns in India.”
Yummy.
For Want of a Shoe
On a separate historic note, hoof care and protection have always been a priority. One of the first mentions of going barefoot was cited in 1793, in Brickell’s Natural History of North Carolina, and in 1831, Bracy Clark’s On the Knowledge of the Ancients Respecting the Art of Shoeing the Horse noted the admirable soundness of shoe-free horses in America.
Near the turn of the twentieth century, Albert Dennison of Watertown, New York, filed a patent for a copper-zinc hoof treatment described as a “pad of zinc and copper strips united together and forming a battery, whereby an electrical current is created that oxidizes the zinc and produces a healing effect upon a sore and tender hoof.” Dollar and Wheatley’s The Handbook of Horseshoeing debated the benefits of copper sulphate to treat canker.
But a decision to eschew iron was at times more pragmatic than noble. The strike of a horseshoe against stone and its ensuing spark could result in an inferno; during Hollywood’s silent film era of the 1920s, a California state license decreed that all horses on a western film set just east of Sacramento be shod with softer, copper-tin alloy shoes to protect against igniting brush fires.
During the Civil War, gunpowder mills were off-limits to shod horses. The grit that leaked from barrels of gunpowder en route to delivery collected between cobblestones, risking a spark from a horseshoe that could strike a fuse capable of tracing back to the factory. It was a lesson all too painfully learned on September 17, 1862, when an iron horseshoe is believed to have caused one of the worst civilian disasters of the Civil War: the Allegheny Arsenal Explosion outside Pittsburgh, where 78 factory workers (mostly women and children) lost their lives.
A modern interest in the health benefits of copper and copper bracelets, including their antimicrobial properties, support of a healthier immune system, cardiovascular health, and reduction in joint pain and stiffness, has started to find its way into the horseshoe industry.
To drive interest in copper’s potential benefits to hoof health, Stromsholm Farrier Supplies in the United Kingdom held a horseshoe-making challenge, judged by seven-time British national champion Gary Darlow, to produce a copper horseshoe.
Albeit cost-prohibitive for the average horseshoe, the contest achieved its intent, spurring interest in how copper alloys, coatings, or threads might benefit future hoof care products.
What Goes Around Comes Around
In the 1961 biography, Black Elk Speaks, as told to John Neihardt, the Oglala Sioux holy man observed:
“Everything the Power of the World does is done in a circle. Everything always comes back again to where they are.”
The same might be said of the most natural choices in horse care.
About L.A. Sokolowski-Pomeroy
Equinista (fashionista + equestrienne) L.A. Sokolowski-Pomeroy is a 2016 winner of AHP Equine Media and Syracuse Press Club awards for excellence in horse sports journalism. The seven-time (2008-2017) American Horse Publications Equine Media Awards winner and finalist, and two-time consecutive winner of its Freelance Equestrian Journalism award, led Equestrian Press support for the 1996 Atlanta Olympics and offers media consultation for an elite stable of clients while maintaining her unique byline among today’s equestrian lifestyle and sports media outlets.