When the owner can afford to feed his horse, he generally allows him sufficient. He soons discovers that the work can not be done without it. He may grudge the cost of keeping, but he soon finds that it is easier to buy food than to buy horses. Starvation and hard work quickly wear them out. Though nobody who can avoid it will starve his working horses, yet many think it no sin to starve idle horses. Colts, before they come into use, and horses thrown out of work by lameness or other causes, are often very ill fed, or, rather, they are not fed at all. The privations of a farmer's stock during winter may not in every case be avoidable, and when they can not be cured they must be endured. But the allowance of food is often reduced too much not because there is little to give, but because it is thought unnecessary or wasteful to give more.

Both young and old horses suffer more mischief from wan: of sufficient food than is generally supposed. The young, however, suffer most. Starvation checks the growth and destroys the shape. Horses that have been ill-fed when young, are almost invariably small, long-legged, light-carcassed, and narrow-chested. Some of them have a good deal of energy, but all are soon exhausted, unfit for protracted exertion. Grown-up horses, when much reduced by deficient nourishment, require more food to put them into working order than would have kept them for two or three months in the condition they require to possess when going into work. If the horses are to be idle for twelve months, it may perhaps be cheaper to let them get very lean than to keep them plump; but for a period of three or four months, during which farm and some other horses are idle or nearly so, it is cheaper to keep as much flesh upon them as they will need at the com men cement of their labor.

When the horse is starved, besides losing strength and flesh, his bowels get full of worms, and his skin covered with lice. Very often he takes mange, and sometimes he does no moult, or the hair falls suddenly and entirely off, leaving the skin nearly bald for a long time. The skip of an ill-fed horse. is always rigid, sticking to the ribs, and the hair dull, staring, soft, dead-like. I have never seen anything like permanent evil arising from temporary starvation of mature horses. If not famished to death, they recover strength and animation upon good and sufficient feeding. But starvation always spoils the shape of a growing horse.