488 COLONIAL HORSES. 



Natal ; for I broke in many scores of them, and was 

 asked to judge horses at several agricultural shows which 

 were held, while I was staying in that country. During 

 1901, I had the pleasure of renewing my acquaintance 

 with these animals on two occasions when I went out to 

 the Cape in veterinary charge of remounts, and of taking 

 the photographs which illustrate these pages. 



My first introduction to Cape horses was in the early 

 sixties, when I was a subaltern in an Indian field battery. 

 Throughout the fifties, the Cape Stud Department, which 

 was under the control of that good horseman. Colonel 

 Apperly, furnished a large number of very useful remounts 

 to the Indian Army ; but soon after the Mutiny, the supply 

 dwindled down almost to vanishing point. To judge by 

 the remainder which I saw and by a couple I owned, 

 they were remarkably hardy and wiry animals, and were 

 up to a fair amount of weight ; although somewhat under- 

 sized (about 15. i) and rather plain about the head and 

 croup. They were certainly well adapted for campaigning 

 in India, on account of their having been bred in a dry 

 and warm climate. This type of Cape horse is now prac- 

 tically extinct. The thick-set Transvaal gelding shown in 

 Fig. 499 is, however, a near approach to it. As Australia 

 is a much better horse-breeding country than South Africa, 

 the continually increasing importation of remounts from 

 the former country, appears to have closed the Indian 

 market to those from the latter, and consequently Cape 

 farmers did not find horse-breeding sufficiently lucrative 

 for the employment of their time and money. We should 

 here bear in mind 'that in South Africa there are few 

 districts suitable for the breeding of valuable horses, and 

 that the horse-breeders of that part of the world are, 

 during the spring, summer and autumn, beset by the 

 danger of " horse sickness." This disease and want of 

 water are the two great banes of horse-breeding there ; 

 and the inordinate dryness of the country greatly reduces 

 the supply of fodder and the amount of arable land. 



