my charges solely to improper
feeding, and have since been successful in rearing others by feeding
them at first on bread and milk, biscuits and gravy, scraps of cooked
vegetables, and when meat has been given, I have taken care to see that
it has been _cooked_. Even with the greatest attention to diet and
exercise, that horror, distemper, has attacked them, but they have made
a good recovery. At the time of writing I am walking a couple of
Pytchley pups, which alas, will soon go to their permanent home. Both of
them have had distemper, one in a very severe form, accompanied by an
abscess in his throat, which prevented him from swallowing anything but
beaten eggs and milk for several days. His portrait (Fig. 141) shows
that he has now "grown into a hound," and I am proud of him, for all of
the Pytchley pups of the first, or spring batch, which were distributed
in this village died of distemper with the exception of my couple. My
pups must have contracted the disease from a neighbouring farmer's dog
who died of it in great agony with an abscess in his throat. Possibly
the adoption of some kind of muzzle would prevent puppies from eating
diseased matter.

[Illustration: Fig. 141.--Pytchley puppy, Mottley.]

My belief in the necessity of giving hounds cooked meat and rigorously
abjuring it in a raw state, excited ridicule here, but when the good
result of such "faddy" feeding was proved by the healthy condition of
the animals, the unbelievers acknowledged themselves converted. Mills,
in his _Life of a Foxhound_, tells us that Ringwood, who appears to have
been a fine hound, was brought up solely on "sweet milk, meal and
broth"; but I find that pups in hard exercise want a generous supply of
cooked paunch as well as bones for the development of their teeth, and
that if they are blown out with sloppy food, their internal arrangements
become disorganized. Besides, a hound cannot gallop on meal alone. One
of the greatest difficulties with which puppy walkers in small villages
have to contend, is in obtaining an adequate supply of paunches and
bones, for country butchers do not kill many animals in the week, as
there is little sale for meat. The average villager purchases a joint
for his "Sunday's dinner," which either lasts the whole week, or is
supplemented by scraps of meat, or even a "bone pie"! An ox paunch is of
course dressed and sold as tripe, all sorts of pork scraps are made up
into brawn, mutton ditto into "faggots