Wild Provender
The Government has been urging country children to collect acorns and horse chestnuts for the farmers, and it might have added crab apples, which are in great profusion. The trouble with all these concentrated foods, including even the soya bean, as the Germans will have discovered, is that they are mechanically poisonous in large quantities. Hence the too widely spread pre- judice against the chestnut, if not the acorn. Wild or free animals know what is good for them, confined animals often do not. A re- luarkable instance of this was seen among the swans at Abbots- ford, a place abounding in the very poisonous Greater Dropwort. Th e swans never touch it unless they are penned up and the plant IS thrown to them. I never heard that the wandering pigs of the New Forest ate too many acorns, though they eat a great
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