Comfrey by Lawrence D. Hills

Author:Lawrence D. Hills [Lawrence D. Hills]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780571280919
Publisher: Faber and Faber
Published: 2011-05-14T04:00:00+00:00

7. Comfrey for grazing animals

Horses have an entirely different temperament to cattle and sheep, even though all three are grazing animals, and the difference can be expressed in the fact that, though sheep dogs are well known, and there are cattle dogs like the Welsh corgi, no one has ever heard of a ‘horse dog’.

When danger threatens, cattle bunch together and so do sheep, and a team of dogs and men can then drive them. The instinct of the stallion is to attack the danger, in company with his equals, giving the mares and foals time to get away. Then, when the enemy is defeated, the stallions race to overtake the herd, and today they will race round the paddock for the pleasure of the speed that is part of their lives right back to Eohippus and the horses which crossed the Bering Straits to the limitless plains of Siberia and Russia. A stallion will kill a dog that tries to ‘herd him’ and can kill a man, standing tall and terrible with death in his front hooves.

Horses graze for speed and they need minerals to build their bones. Mares in foal need calcium and phosphorus to build up the bones of wobbly-legged foals which can so soon follow the herd. All through the crucial years up to the date of the Derby, these minerals must be available to the young animals as they are needed to thicken and strengthen and make ever more dense the bones which take the shock of the thundering hooves as the favourite pulls ahead of the field into the straight.

You can put out mineral licks for cattle—artificial blocks of mineral salts which are slowly soluble—but not for horses. You can feed pigs on a scientifically balanced ration, but today they are fed quantities of copper salts to prevent pig anaemia. Of these they absorb only between 2 and 6 per cent and the balance passes through them to add up to copper toxicity in the pasture. Horses cannot be fed ground chalk in their racing mash, for they are no more able to absorb it than we are the chalk added to our paper-white bread to replace the calcium molecules chosen by the roots and stored in the germ and the bran of the wheat. Yet you cannot feed horses on wholemeal bread for they would get too much carbohydrate.

When you see horses swishing their tails under the trees in the paddock, notice how level the branches have been bitten off. A mare will rob her own bones for minerals to feed the foal inside her (so will every female animal), but she will stand staggering tall as a stallion to strip the bark off the twigs and thin branches which hold the most minerals.

I once led a mare called Lyon’s Lass for a mile and a half along a country lane and let her graze as she would. She took yarrow, chicory and all the deep rooting herbs rather than the lushest grasses which were at their best in the full green tide of summer.

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