“They would be more numerous,” says Gifford, “if in any way cared for; but they lie out in the open fields summer and winter, and get no food but what they can find for themselves; so in bad winters many of them die with hunger and cold. It will, no doubt, be wondered at by strangers that so little care is taken about these sheep and horses which are so useful and beneficial; the reason whereof is, that the poor inhabitants, having used their utmost endeavours, can scarce find food and shelter for their oxen and cows, without which they could not live; and in hard winters many of them die for want of fodder, so they have none to bestow on their sheep and horses, until they find more time to improve the land.”[30] [Illustration: BY THE VOE.] It should perhaps be kept in mind, as a qualification of these comments, that while dependent on some degree of help in finding food in winter, and especially so in the poorer parts of Shetland, the pony is much less in need of shelter than most other animals, and appears, indeed, to thrive much better even when he is exposed to severe weather conditions than when he is kept indoors. But the lot of the Island pony is still a hard one in the long winters, when the scanty livelihood which he can gather on the mosses, by the dyke-sides, and on the sea-shore is but poorly supplemented by the occasional sheaf of oats which is all that his owner can usually allow him. The great majority of the ponies in the Islands are in the hands of crofters, either owned by them or held on the system of “halvers,” under which merchants or others supply brood mares in return for a half interest in their progeny. The mares nursing foals are kept usually about the croft until their foals are old enough to follow them to the “Scathold”; other ponies spend their whole summer in the hills, returning to the nearer fields, after the crops are cleared, when the approach of winter makes some additional food necessary. It is still too common, though less so than formerly, to leave the foals unweaned, with the result that the mares so treated usually foal but once in two years. This wasteful plan is due to the difficulty of finding food for the weaned foals; but the attempted economy so completely defeats its own object that it cannot fail to die out. In the beginning of last century we find the Highland Society’s report, already quoted, referring to “an absurd custom among the farmers of preserving for stallions ... the most unpromising of the young of the species”;[31] and very competent observers state in 1845 that “the ponies are now much smaller in size than they were thirty years ago, entirely owing to the fact that all the best and stoutest are exported, and stallions of the most puny size are allowed to go at large.”[32]