The economics of feeding horses / [Harold A. Woodruff].

  • Woodruff, Harold A.
Date:
1912
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: The economics of feeding horses / [Harold A. Woodruff]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    sufficient to provide an animal with carbon or iron, oxygen or nitrogen, in simple form, for, as such, these substances could not be assimilated. They have to be built up into suitable compounds by plants, and then can be used as food for animals. A plant, by means of the energy it derives from the sun, can take in and assimilate into its own tissues simple inorganic sub- stances such as carbon dioxide and water, or salts such as sodium nitrate, and build them up into complex organic bodies; but an animal has no such power. The animal requires the finished products of plant activity as its raw material, and can make no use of the simple substances which serve as the food of plants. Further, the higher animals are all warm-blooded, and have a fixed normal body temperature which in health has to be kept up by means of food. For the purposes of animal heat, food may be looked upon as the fuel keeping up the fire; and just as the heat from a fire may be used to generate steam, which in its turn will do work, so the food supplies energy for the work of the body. Work is being done in the body constantly, whether the animal is asleep or awake, at rest or at work. All the vital pro- cesses—such as the beating of the heart to drive the blood round the circulation, the movements of the chest in breathing, the secreting of digestive juices and other glandular products—entail work being done or energy being expended, and are therefore ultimately dependent on the food. Thus it is all important that the food of an animal shall be adequate in quantity and suitable in kind, and, further, in the case of the horse, where the cost of the food is placed against the animal’s earning capacity, it must be arranged as economically as possible.