‘Impecuniosus,’ a thoroughly practical man, begs us to observe that all horses will ‘go short’ for a day or two the first time that they wear tips. This is because they feel strange on first having their heels let out of a vice.
It is well to go ‘slow and sure;’ therefore it would be advisable for a man to experiment upon one or two of his horses, say one with flat, weak, tender, shelly, brittle hoofs, and the other with what he considers as the stoutest in his stable. The possibility is that he would find at the end of a month that the weak-footed horse would apparently have derived the most benefit from the treatment, although theory might lead him to suppose that the contrary would be the case.
The tips should, of course, be applied cold. They can be made whilst hot to the exact shape and size. To facilitate and expedite this (and so to avoid lifting up the foot and cooling the iron two or three times), after the crust on the toe has been pared and rasped into proper form, the outline can be easily scratched with a fine, sharp nail, either on the floor, if it should be smooth enough, or else on a piece of board on which the horse is made to stand whilst one of his fore-feet is held up by a groom. When it is the outline of a hind foot that has to be traced, the fore foot on the same side should be held up, because the horse cannot so easily shift about the foot that is being traced if he is obliged to bear his weight on two legs on the same side to do so; not that there is much difficulty, or time required, in
