The "tear-channels" which led to this digression can be helped _not_ to exist by using a boracic acid lotion to the eye; but the stains are often ineffaceable.
=Anæmia=--a condition of general depression in health, with impoverishment of the blood--is of all serious diseases the most common among dogs. It is this condition that causes dogs to have worms; it is this deficiency in the blood supply, both in quantity and quality, which brings about ninety out of every hundred cases of skin disease. The original cause of the disease in toy dogs was the way in which they were, and unfortunately often still are, kept, fed, and housed. A number of dogs kept together in some artificially-heated building, confined in small pens, obliged to breathe impure air, and fed on Indian meal, biscuits, oatmeal, and other cereals, with little or no meat--this is kennel life, and a splendid foundation for anæmia. We all know how worms and eczema and other skin troubles beset toys kept "in kennels," but not until the knowledge has caused people to give up keeping them thus, and handing on hereditary eczema and hereditarily vitiated blood to their puppies, shall we get rid of the inherited tendency to poverty of blood which makes so many toy dogs possessions of anxiety rather than sources of satisfaction to their owners.
If a law could be passed obliging all dogs to receive a suitable daily allowance of good, fresh, underdone meat, and abolishing farinaceous feeding altogether, even for five years, it is not too much to say that at the end of this time eczma in its more common forms would have died out, worms be the infrequent exception rather than the rule, and "distemper" would have ceased to be a thing of terror.
It is extraordinary how ignorant educated people, otherwise well informed, can show themselves on this subject. I have repeatedly received letters in which, after detailing a diet of milk puddings, oatmeal porridge, vegetables, bread and gravy, and so on, the writer gravely adds the assurance--"But I have never given a farinaceous diet!" Green vegetables and such starchy vegetables as potatoes are absolutely useless to dogs, and so indigestible as only to rank second to absolute poisons, like carrots and turnips. No dog can get the mineral salts necessary to healthy blood out of oatmeal, Indian corn meal, or any other meal, nor out of a little iron-hard, dried gristle or some similar substance, such as appears in some so-called "meat" foods. It can only get these substances out of its natural and proper food--meat. Puppies fed on meat from the time their teeth can bite it do not have anæmia, and are consequently free from skin trouble: their blood is rich and pure, and they do not harbour worms. I only ask any reader who doubts these statements to try the very simple experiment of separating a litter at seven weeks, and feeding half the pups on meat, of course varied, cut up small, and given in moderate quantity three times, and subsequently twice, a day, with a very small proportion of wheaten flour-stuff given merely as a treat and variety, in the form of small sweet biscuits or sponge cake, to afford the needful bulk to the meals. No gravy, milk, vegetables, nor any liquid but water to be given. The other pups in the litter can be fed on the old, artificial, unnatural plan of constant, large, sloppy meals of milk food. If the conditions are otherwise equal--plenty of fun, sunshine, and exercise being given--the difference between the two sets of pups will probably be quite sufficiently marked to uphold my argument, with the further addition that the meat-fed puppies will be found a good deal less objectionable in the house before their education begins, and infinitely easier to train, than their brethren on farinaceous diet.