Related article: limited area had to be shared with mares and foals the defects produced by want of acreage soon became conspicuous. A stud may be kept anywhere, and on almost any soil — though one soil is better than another for the purpose — if there is a proper proportion be- tween the number of horses and the grass-land they range over. But the number of horses that a given acreage can carry is strictly limited, and varies with sex and age. It varies, too, a little on different soils, but so trifling is the advantage or disadvantage of the best or poorer soils that the matter may Order Vermox Online be safely ignored in practice. The number of horses per hundred acres of grass-land is not a matter upon which an owner or breeder has a right to have a personal opinion, if he wants to get the best results. It is not one that the abundance or shortness of a season's herbage should in the least influence, if the success, that is health, of the stud is the one thing to be worked for. The rule we are about to give is simple enough, and has been worked out on many varying soils over and over again, and found to be the best in practice. In-foal mares require ten acres per head. All stock requires six acres per head till they have com- pleted their sixth year. After this period, horses and mares, not in-foal, will do with five acres per head. If staling is to be avoided for good, only a rigid limitation of heads per acres will prove satisfactory. Some breeders may laugh at ** such cast-iron nonsense." They may do as they like about that, for they are either following some such practice unknowingly, or will sooner Vermox Uk or later find out to their cost that they have not done so. For though this rule is 1901.] THOROUGHBREDS AND THEIR GRASS-LAND. 321 simple, it is not so simple as it looks; a forty-acre pasture carry- ing two in -foal mares, and four head of older stock or three young ones, as the case may be, wants keeping in order. The cattle and sheep, especially the latter, which should keep the pasture down to a level, fruitful, growing, green surface, require all the skill and experience of Vermox 100mg Tablets the grazier. This farming of the land is the whole secret of success on ground devoted to studs. That the sheep and cattle rob the horses is the Vermox 500mg cry of the studsmen go where you will, but they do nothing of the kind under normal Vermox Mexico conditions ; it is only when we subject them to extraordinary circumstances that the bare struggle for existence makes one animal rob another. Such is the nature of our soils and the plants they carry that without sheep and cattle you can- not have the grass you require for the horses. Try as you will to keep down the grass Vermox Canada and make it fertile by horses alone, it runs away from them ; and you ruin your pastures in a few seasons, as well as per- manently injure your mares and foals. The pastures stale for want of varied stocking, and horse- flesh goes from bad to worse on them as the seasons run on. They exhibit a contrast of surface, which must be seen and studied to be understood. One part is rough and almost fit for meadow; another eaten as short as the poor animals can gnaw it. The neglected por- tion is so Vermox Tablet staled by the presence of dung that nothing will persuade horses to eat it as pasture or as hay, do . what you will with it. The shorter, or eaten portion, is much less staled, thanks to a certain carefulness on the part of the animals, but it is most un- suitable food for valuable stock. Grass can be too closely eaten by hungry, half- poisoned horses to be at its best, even when that best is but poor. It is true enough that both sheep and cattle rob the horses, where they have not a sufficient range. Nothing likes the long sour grass of staled horse-paddocks. They all know the difference between good and bad grass ; and every kind of stock suffers by cleaning up the pastures, let the ground be as pure as it may. But where the horses have a sufficient range of sweet grass per head to begin with, they will take good care with both teeth and hoofs that neither sheep nor stock take from them the best the ground can give. Studsmen are not graziers. Why should we expect it of them ? They have been trained in a remarkably narrow groove — to watch and study their animal, and nothing else. There are plenty of books of the life, his- tory, breeding, and training of the racer, but not one of them has ever considered its natural Buy Vermox Online food- supply in a scientific, or even in an intelligent, manner. To the horse grower grass has ever been, and is, grass, a matter unworthy of careful study. The purity and quality of turf are matters that the average studsman has never heard of, or seen discussed in print. Personal convenience only has been considered at stud -farms, and, as a result, the pastures have been absolutely ignored. To the untrained eye one Vermox Worm Tablets piece of turf is much the same as another,, a pure unsoiled pasture not very unlike a badly staled one ; and convenient handiness being the only rule which has governed the formation of stud enclosures, the wider pas- ture fields have been cut up by fences into paddocks, of a greater or lesser size, according to their distance from home. If they are very near the boxes, from two to 322 BAILY S MAGAZINE. [Mat five acres has been considered large enough. It is a very easy matter to turn out and collect brood mares or foals which are in such little enclosures near at hand ; and it is a great bother iat times in our uncertain climate to take them further afield and fetch them home at short notice. As a result we find brood mares of the greatest value in the finest weather on absolutely inadequate pasturage. We have seen as many as five in -foal mares on four acres of ground ; and the paddock was not pure soil — very far from it — but grass which for a great number of years had been treated in the same way. This is not the case at one stud only, but at many ; if it were not for certain honourable exceptions we know of, we might safely say all. The thoroughbred breeders of England would recoup themselves over and over again for the outlay, if they paid a silent -tongued master grazier and specialist in grass- lore to drop down several times a year without warning on their studs, and report