ELEVENTH ANNUAL YEAR BOOK— PART XI 707 



policy to keep some farmers rigidly in line for improvement in the stock 

 of horses with each succeeding generation. Every lapse of confidence 

 either in his own ability as a breeder or in the continuity of the market 

 subjects a man to the temptation to sacrifice valuable breeding stock. One 

 may trust the unprejudiced appraisal of the market to show more accur- 

 ately than his own possibly biased judgment whether he is breeding the 

 kind of horses most wanted. He can trust to the matchless ability of 

 draft horses to handle wagons and farm implements in all sorts of difficult 

 situations to maintain a demand for work stock. 



When horses are high and again when they are low in price many good 

 mares are thrown on the market by farmers. When horses are high- 

 priced some men are afraid to invest in a good mare for fear that she may 

 depreciate in cash value while paying for herself in colts. They content 

 themselves with cheap mares because while horses are at the high spot any 

 kind of scrub colt from such stock will bring some kind of a remunera- 

 tive price. They sell the best they have and keep the plugs 'because they 

 argue that the good ones are worth too much for a common farmer to 

 own. Back in the nineties, when the financial depression knocked the 

 bottom out of the horse market along with everything else, farmers of 

 this habit of thought sold the best mares they had, because they were the 

 only ones that would bring a decent price, and kept their trash for foun- 

 dation stock to breed from when prices should improve. 



The advancement in the quality of grade horses in this country has 

 been made by farmers who figured such situations out quite differently. 

 When horses bring high prices, as they have of late years, they have 

 found that the real good ones reaching the market seem to be particularly 

 scarce. The same flourishing business conditions that make a great 

 demand for horses, inspire a desire on the part of large firms to make 

 such an impressive display of their teams as calls for the very best 

 horses. Also, the more urgent the rush of traffic, the greater is the 

 appreciation of extreme size in draft horses. When the margin between 

 a 1500-pound gelding and one of 1800 pounds of equal excellence is 

 measured by the margin between $200 and $300, which is about the con- 

 dition at present, it does not really take much deftness at figures to 

 ascertain that the big one makes more profit. When horses were low 

 in price 15 years ago, these same farmers figured it out that they could 

 afford to own good mares when they cost only a moderate sum. They 

 weeded out their poorest stock at whatever it would bring, and conse- 

 quently they had a creditable foundation and a little surplus stock 

 already on hand when in due time the market recuperated. 



It really does not require a great outlay of capital to keep a farm 

 stocked with high-class draft work mares, provided no temporary fit of 

 discouragement is allowed to prompt their displacement with a lot of 

 disreputable scrubs. The initial outlay for good mares is soon returned 

 in the extra prices which their colts bring. Then it is merely a matter 

 of hanging on to the right type through thick and thin. There is no extra 

 cost for that. A man has no right to charge a good big filly with the 

 price she might bring if sold, when in reality the cost of her dam has 



