"The best saddle horses we possess being now occasionally
produced by crossing the race horse with a pony mare. This
experiment often succeeding with one of the parents so ill
fitted for taking part in it as the modern racer, there is
every reason to conclude that, with parents properly
constituted on both sides, the breeding of the best class of
saddle horses might be accompanied with little uncertainty."
Thus far we find that the suggestions for breeding small horses set out
on pp. 36-43 were anticipated over sixty years ago. We must, before
taking leave of the author, glance at his plan for "renovating" our half
wild breeds of ponies. If it were practicable to carry out the
experiment he outlines, the results would be of undoubted interest.
"To experiment properly in this matter it is necessary that a
public establishment should appropriate some extensive district
of unreclaimed and bad pasturage to the maintenance of a large
body of ponies. These should be interfered with only to the
extent of severe selection, founded on annual trials; taking
the animals for this purpose from their pasturage for a few
days during the summer, and tying them to pickets. Here they
should be closely inspected, and after the best formed had
been selected from the rest, they should be taken ten or twenty
at a time by rough riders of light weight, and submitted to a
trial of some hours' duration. The animals which went through
this satisfactorily should be divided into two portions: one
should be returned to their old pasturage to remain at their
then stature; while the other portion should be made to occupy
a somewhat better pasturage in order that their offspring might
acquire greater stature, the rest to be drafted and sold. When
old enough the enlarged stock should be tried, and such as went
through it well should be kept, and turned out into a little
better pasturage than that in which they had been reared, while
those rejected should be drafted and sold. It is only in this
very gradual manner that the stature of a race can be increased
to the point required. Ponies of a pure race being so vigorous
as to be wholly unfitted for rich pasturage, they become upon
it balls of fat. None of our native ponies under the plan now
proposed would be enlarged or withdrawn from their miserable
pasturage unless their form and action were good; the only
change then effected would be a pasturage a little better. Any
further enlargement would be made to depend upon the manner in
which they had been found to bear the preceding one."
His plan has at all events the great merit that it proposes to seek the
limit of enlargement in the half-wild ponies without risking loss of
hardiness and other valuable qualities by pampering.
WORKS BY SIR WALTER GILBEY, BART.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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