ABSTRACT
In addition to proper feeding and adequate care and attention, regular exercise is just as important, indeed essential, for a horse’s welfare. The military manuals of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries emphasize the importance of keeping horses in ‘hard condition’, which ‘is the result of sufficient and judicious feeding coupled with properly regulated work. Troop horses suffer as much from insufficiency of regular exercise as from excess of work’ (War Office 1904, 6). Cooped up in the mountains of Judaea in 1918 British cavalry horses could not be exercised because of the terrain and lack of staff and consequently they suffered loss of condition. The same problem in the Balkan campaign was solved by turning the horses out during the day along with the mules and allowing them to roam at will. It was found that they digested their rations much better because they were exercising by wandering in search of grazing all day, and ‘they were punctual, almost to the minute, in filing back to their own lines at feed times’ (Blenkinsop and Rainey 1925, 228; 279–80).
