The management and treatment of the horse in the stable, field, and ...

In the Stable, Field, and on the Road. 115
or it may come on suddenly. When it comes on sud-
denly it is attended with great suffering. Occasionally
we have suppuration in the fissure, sloughing of the
laminae, caries of the bone, superfluous granulation, and
in very severe cases the animal gives up, refuses all food,
sinks, and dies. Mr. Greaves, in a letter in the Veterinarian,
vol. 48, p. 72, says, " I fully believe that in many
cases there is a constitutional tendency to sandcrack, for
if we get the fissure to grow out and entirely disappear
in one place another crack will make its appearance in
another part of the hoof. We often notice that the horse
with a sandcrack in one foot, whether it be hind or fore,
will sooner or later have another sandcrack in one of the
other feet." The author cannot fall into the view of Mr.
Greaves upon the constitutional point of the disease,
unless, indeed, the patient has an hereditary mal-
formation of the foot, as some horses have. Colts
by Snowstorm, for instance, have most of them one club
foot. I am more in favour of the view taken by my
friend Mr. Broad, of Bath. In a conversation I once had
with him about this disease, he said, " The majority of
cases of sandcrack that came under his notice for treat-
ment were those that occur in the toes of heavy cart
horses ; they do not arise as the effects of dryness or the
defects of the horn itself, as, on the contrar}^, they occur
in the strongest and thickest of hoofs which are de-
fective in shape, being mostly very upright, so that
when the horse is shod with high caulkings—the
principal cause—and put to excessively heavy pulling,
the front part of the hoof gets more strain upon it than
it can sustain, the result being a fracture of the horn.