Once a month two well known citizens from Lanark used to drive a nifty horse hitched up to a spic and span buggy into Carleton Place on business. They always pulled up at the back door of the Queen’s Hotel, and there the horse, not the gents, was given a much needed stimulant of a shot of liquor fed to him from a tin dish.
The horse always seemed to smack his lips as if to say,
“That touched the spot.”
In Ireland and England, racehorses are given Guiness as part of their daily diet. In the normal digestive process the bacteria and protozoa in the horse’s gut ferment the whole grains and fiber in order to aid the digestive process. This is why they can eat hay or raw grains and we cannot–we do not have a fermentation vat in our cecum (actually we do not have a cecum, all we have is an appendix). So, we prefer the grains to be fermented in a vat, then poured into a bottle before we partake of it. Also, we have to look at body weight here as that has an effect on the amount of alcohol one can take in before becoming drunk. An average small horse weighs 1000 pounds, while many of our warmbloods and heavier horses weigh in at 1500 pounds or more, with draft horses in the one ton range. So a bottle or two or three of beer or wine and even of hard liquor would be distributed through a large body mass. Many horses will drink wine or beer happily but I doubt there are very many that will get through a bottle of vodka.The reality is you will go broke buying beer or wine long before you will get your horse drunk or hooked on alcohol. Many of the dark beers have high mineral contents and are fairly nutritious, especially Guinness.
No word on what the horse behind the Queen’s hotel was given.
I have written a few stories on the Queen’s Hotel but– these are are a series of stories I continue to write from the Desk Book of The Chatterton House Hotel (Queen’s Hotel) Carleton Place from the Carleton Place and Beckwith Heritage Museum
Part 1- Tales of the Chatteron House Corset — Queen’s Hotel in Carleton Place- can be found here.
Part 2- Hell on Wheels at Lady Chatterton’s Hotel in Carleton Place– can be found here.
Part 3- I Will Take Some Opium to Go Please —The “Drug Dispensary” at the Chatterton House Hotel
Part 4- Chatterton House Hotel Registrar- George Hurdis -1884
Part 5-What the Heck was Electric Soap? Chatterton House Hotel Registrar
Part 6-The First Mosh Pits in Carleton Place — The Opera House of the Chatterton House Hotel
Part 7-All the President’s Men — Backroom Dealings in Carleton Place?
Part 8- Who Was John Boland? Chatterton House/Queen’s Hotel Registry — The Burgess Family Dynasty
Buy Linda Secaspina’s Books— Flashbacks of Little Miss Flash Cadilac– Tillting the Kilt-Vintage Whispers of Carleton Place and 4 others on Amazon or Amazon Canada or Wisteria at 62 Bridge Street in Carleton Place
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