DETERIORATION OF THE AUSTRALIAN HORSE 21 



Kitchener to be especially badly selected, and by 

 Colonel Birkbeck to be sadly disappointing. Three 

 hundred and nine thousand horses had been supplied 

 to the troops in South Africa up to the end of January, 

 [902, of which only 20,000 had been supplied from 

 Australia. Is it not lamentable that such a small 

 number of our picked cattle should have called 

 forth such condemnation from Lord Kitchener and 

 Colonel Birkbeck ? 



A Minister in the House of Commons (March 

 17, 1902) said that the Government had taken 

 an enormous number of horses from Australia, but 

 that it was difficult to get those small compact horses 

 that the Government required. I pray breeders to 

 take note of this song, sung again and again — 

 ' Wanted, small compact horses.' 



The owners of one of the best-known stations on 

 the Dawson wrote of some of the horses bred in 

 Queensland, that they were rubbish, a disgrace to 

 the men who bred them, and that they must know 

 that their horses were going back. Of course they 

 knew it. But there have been two difficulties in 

 the way of getting better : first, vested interests 

 and the pseans of racing breeders, who from habit 

 and education laud their racers ; and, secondly, the 

 difficulty — almost impossibility — of getting better. 



These two things have led them to breed from 

 creatures ' which ought never to have appeared in 

 the Stud-Book.' 



The So7i^A Australian Register, a leading Ade- 



