Geldings for haulage purposes are always in demand, but big powerful mares are equally useful for the same purpose, and it is much better to sell a non-breeder for the lorry than to sell her for another breeder to meet with disappointment. It is obvious that there will be a great scarcity of weighty working horses when the countries now involved in war settle down to peaceful trades and occupations, and there is no country which stands to benefit more than Great Britain, which is the best of all breeding grounds for draught horses. To allow, what would otherwise be, a useful worker to eat the bread of idleness because it was regarded as too well bred or valuable to wear a collar is not a policy to pursue or to recommend, especially to farmers, seeing that the arable land tenant can put a colt into the team, between two steady horses at almost any time of the year, while the occupiers of grass farms may easily start their young Shires as workers by hitching them to a log of wood or some chain harrows, and afterwards work them in a roll. There is no doubt, whatever, that many stallions would leave a much higher percentage of foals if they were “broken in” during their two-year-old days, so that they would take naturally to work when they grew older and could therefore be relied upon to work and thus keep down superfluous fat. This would be far better than allowing them to spend something like nine months of the year in a box or small paddock with nothing to do but eat. In past times more working stallions could be found, and they were almost invariably good stock getters, but since showing has become popular it is almost a general rule to keep well-bred, or prize-winning, colts quite clear of the collar lest they should work themselves down in condition and so fail to please possible buyers on the look-out for show candidates. A little more than twenty years ago there was an outcry against show condition in Shires, and this is what a very eminent breeder of those days said on the subject of fat-- “It is a matter of no consequence to any one, save their owners, when second or third-class horses are laden with blubber; but it is a national calamity when the best animals--those that ought to be the proud sires and dams of an ever-improving race--are stuffed with treacle and drugged with poisons in order to compete successfully with their inferiors. Hence come fever in the feet, diseased livers, fatty degeneration of the heart, and a host of ailments that often shorten the lives of their victims and always injure their constitutions.”