6J2 IOWA DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE 
the evolution of the size and weight of the Percheron draft horse, the 
future prospects of the draft horse, and the "new move" in Wisconsin 
liorse breeding due to the passage of the stallion law, devised and 
fathered by Dr. A. S. Alexander, in charge of the horse breeding depart- 
ment at our Agricultural College at Madison. The article is interesting 
to Wisconsin breeders and farmers. We therefore print it in full: 
The automobile has cut into the Hackney and the trotter. Folk, Hughes 
and John Healy of Chicago have about extinguished the thoroughbred, 
but nothing like that has happened to the draft horse. He never had a 
better year. 
The Hackney was a gay-looking fellow that consumed as much life 
force going up and down as straight ahead. Because of the pounding his 
feet and legs often went back on him, and he had to be coddled like a 
lady's toy dog. It took an Englishman to properly brush and blow the 
dust out of his hide of a morning — Americans wouldn't and Swedes could- 
n't. Anybody who owned a pair of Hackneys belonged to the leisure 
class. 
Then the automobile came along. It went faster, looked flashier, and 
kicked up the dust magnificently. By night it sent tireless link-boys 
of light, two hundred feet along, ahead of it to announce its coming, and 
it cost several times as much as the Hackney. It soon relegated him, 
and now he is only a pensioner. 
But the draft horse, so far, is safe from the machine. Maybe the auto- 
van will drive him from the city streets — ^that wouldn't be a bad thing 
for the city streets — but I don't think the autoplow and autoharrow will 
banish him from the farm, because autoplows can't raise little auto-plows 
each year to rustle for themselves in the pastures. 
The draft horse is getting bigger and bigger. In the late '80s if one 
weighing over 1,600 pounds came from France it was an event, and the 
horse papers talked about him — with pictures. Today the draft importer 
will touch nothing under 1,800 pounds, and 3-year-old colts often run up 
to a ton. 
The favorite draft breed in America — 6 or 8 to 1 — is the Percheron of 
France. He comes from Le Perche (southwest of Paris), and nowhere 
else. The horse breeders of that district have banded themselves into 
a guild or union and decreed and decided that no horse from outside the 
irregular borders of their district can ever be recorded as a Percheron 
in the stud book of the breed. A colt foaled just across the line, out of 
a mare and by a sire correctly registered, cannot himself be registered. 
The foundation blood of the Percheron is, or is said to be Arab. The 
Frenchman will tell you that a Percheron is an Arab "made heavy" by 
the climate. But whether Arabian extract or no, it is sure 
that the breed has been made heavy by the climate or human 
selection during the past half century. When George Sand wrote, the 
Percheron was famous as a road horse, a traveler, a ground coverer. Her 
heroes used to drive hither and thither "behind four splendid distance- 
eating Percherons." No modern Frenchman would dream of driving up 
to his Ninette's door behind four Percherons. 
