horse bread and other eccentric thoughts.

​Anyone who is fascinated with how racehorses were trained and fed in past decades will bear witness to the fact that the intelligent and knowledgeable trainer and head man pre 2nd World War and for the following couple of decades held a greater collective wisdom of the horses in their care than their modern equivalents. That is not to criticise our present-day trainers and their senior staff. Today, to a great extent, at least in a routine sort of way, feed merchants determine what goes in a horse’s manger or food bowl, with science also having a secondary determining influence. Nuts, for all they contain the necessary vitamins and minerals a racehorse requires for best performance on the gallops and racecourse, are a one-fits-all feeding method.
If you are fortunate to be present at feeding time in a racehorse stable, it is clear why racehorse nuts have become the industry standard method of feeding. The nuts are tipped into a large wheeled container and pushed door to door, the nuts dispensed quickly into bowls that can be accessed, certainly in modern barn complexes, without need to open stable doors. I am not of the opinion this is wrong in any way, though it does appear more like feeding time at the zoo, rather than a reasoned approach to the dietary needs of each individual equine athlete.
In the past, and again, I am not suggesting the modern is wrong and the past knew best, trainers would feed by eye, by the state of the dung of each horse, by the coat of the horse, whether he was skittish or lethargic and how he ate his food.
Because of the stringent anti-doping rules in place, I would imagine trainers are terrified of a member of staff or well-meaning owner giving a horse an outside food source in case it should contain a minute amount of a banned substance that days or even weeks down the line might present itself in analysis of an after-race sample of urine. There might even be ‘do not feed the animals’ signs found in racecourse stables.
When I was young, racehorse cubes, as I think they used to be called, were a novelty that older trainers were suspicious of, preferring to stick to rolled oats and bran at feed times. Modern trainers swear by the convenience of nuts and are, I believe, suspicious of bedding their horses on straw. Yet, if you were to research the subject, horses in hard work in the pre-war years, and certainly pre 1st World War, that were consuming 18lb or more of oats were naturally more inclined to eat their straw bedding than the finest hay in their racks. Hence, as Horace-Hayes wrote, ‘the so-called vice of eating straw bedding is often an act of obedience to the stimulus of a healthy appetite’. Also, carrots are today fed in small quantities as a treat, as are apples and polo mints, yet they are a wonderful alternative to several hours of grass intake and far more valuable as a food source during the winter months.
In days of old, trainers considered it a great benefit to give racehorses in hard training a rest from its usual grub and for a day or two would increase the quantity of hay through the day and feed them carrots, apples, dandelions, roots and all, even parsnips and swede, if the horse is inclined, plus a cold mash in the morning and a hot mash, perhaps with linseed and other ‘goodies’ in the evening. R.D. Stewart thought the change in diet the equivalent of ‘a good lie-up in bed to the hardened working man’. To Stewart, this break in dietary regime would refresh the nervous system.
Something that used to bother me was the time a horse would go between his last meal and racing. If a horse was to leave early for the racecourse, his or her first feed of the day would be brought forward in order the food could be digested before travelling. Yet, apart from a small amount of hay, possibly, that horse would doubtless not eat again until he reaches home again, irrespective of whether the race is mid-day or early evening. To me, that was too long to go without sustenance. I know I would faint if I didn’t eat for most of the day before undergoing such a hard task as the racehorse must face. 
The title of this piece is ‘Horse Bread’ and though there are different recipes, the one in John Fairfax-Blakeborough’s book ‘Paddock Personalities’ is: Take wheat-meal, one peck (2-gallons), rye-meal, beans and oatmeal, all ground very small, of each half-a-peck, aniseeds, and liquorish, of each one ounce, white sugar candy four ounces, all in fine powder, the yolks and whites of twenty eggs well beaten and so much white wine as will knead it into a paste. Make this into great loaves, bake them well and after they be two or three days old, let them eat, but chip away the outside.
If you are surprised by the use of white wine, don’t be. The famous Irish stout is, or was, a staple for any horse considered a ‘poor doer’, with every variety of booze from whiskey to sherry used to ‘pep-up’ the appetite of a horse. The ‘jady’ or lazy horse might even be given a 3rd of a bottle of whiskey before a race. Do modern rules on doping preclude such a practice today? Are inebriated horses against the rules? 
Of course, before the honourable George Lambton kicked-up a fuss about it in the 1920’s, horses were regularly abused with cocaine, with the consequence that though the horse, where before it was lethargic in a race, would bolt up, as it cooled it would be in such a mad frenzy it might cause itself, or anyone coming into contact with it, great harm. Doping in all its forms was quite legal until the early part of the last century. To prove doping was in regular use in British racing, having instructed the Jockey Club of his intentions, he doped three of his least useful horses, all of which, if I remember correctly, all won their races at long odds.
In conclusion, though the past may be a different country, I believe, and even suggest, that those trainers who cannot compete in terms of numbers and quality, might want to think outside the box and consult the writings of long dead equine experts to discover the (legal) tricks of the feed room that might help restore a horse to form or even transform their form from useless to better.