horses with a cold-fitted shoe. It is not to be lost sight of that nearly a score of these companies employ each thousands of horses; and yet leading authorities have pronounced opinions utterly at variance with each other on the use of the shoe. But doctors always have differed. The statement that fifty cold-fitted shoes are lost to every hot one, certainly could not be substantiated; they stand at no disadvantage at all in this respect; the nails hold better in horn that has not been rendered brittle by scorching. The tramways have now been using them for nearly two years, and that looks as if they kept in their places pretty well. In Spain, where cold shoeing is universal, and forges very wide apart, shoes keep on until they wear out.
Cold fitting by no means entails any necessity for ‘fitting the foot to the shoe.’ The shoe, whilst hot, is forged to the correct size and shape of the foot. The paring of the crust to fit the flat surface of the cold iron takes longer than burning it down with a hot shoe, and the paring of the surface on the bottom is the only ‘fitting the foot to the shoe’ that has to be done when the latter is of the correct pattern. When it is not, hot and cold fitting stand just equal.
Another objection to the fancied advantage of gaining such very close apposition by burning in, is that the horse thus often gets shod too tightly, and every one knows that this is injurious to the animal; although it is not every one that is fully alive to the great amount of misery and disorder it entails.
