HOW THE TROTTING HORSE IS BRED. 



PACING. TROTTING. 



Story's Clay, b. h. by Everett Clay 2:14f 2:18 



Captain Crouch, cb. b. by General Smitb 2:13 2:25 



Red Bud, cb. b. by Redfern 2:12 2:14 



Cleveland S., b. b. by Montgomery 2:10 2:24 



Connor, bl. b. by C. F. Clay 2:14 2:13 



Babette, b. m. by Sir John 2:12 2:22 



This exhibit might be further extended, but the foregoing will 

 suffice for the purpose intended. The only remark that seems 

 needed by way of explanation is that all the animals named, except 

 two (San Pedro and Wardwell), made their records first as trotters. 



In surveying the whole situation there is but little encourage- 

 ment in attempting to solve the problem of how to reduce the 

 ratio of the pacers and at the same time avoid the reduction of 

 the speed of the trotters. The central point in the problem is 

 the development of speed; and so long as the pacer comes to his 

 speed so much quicker and easier than the trotter, and so long as 

 the best pacer is a little faster, as he has always been, than the 

 best trotter, there is no probability that his speed will not be 

 developed. All efforts at repression or exclusion of the pacer 

 from contesting for prizes at public meetings would be futile and, 

 in a sense, unjust. Moreover, this would not be in the province 

 of the breeder and he must work out his plans within the boun- 

 daries of his own domain. The laws of heredity apply to either 

 of the two forms of the trot the lateral and the diagonal just 

 as certainly as they apply to the two forms united. This is the 

 breeder's opportunity, and if he grasps it he will make progress 

 slowly but surely. In his breeding selections he must lay it 

 down as an inviolable rule that all pacers, especially pacers with 

 their speed developed, must be excluded, no difference how 

 strongly they may be bred in the best trotting lines. If a horse 

 produces some fillies that, like Maud S., Sunol and hundreds of 

 others, are halfway, or more than halfway, inclined to pace, he 

 must rigorously keep them at the trot and nothing but the trot, 

 unless he sells them. He must study intelligently the pedigrees 

 and produce of the generations away back, and make such selec- 

 tions as are most likely to promote his object and least likely to 

 violate the rule laid down. Of all the varieties of the horse on 

 the face of the globe the American trotter is the typical harness 

 horse. Our civilization no longer requires the saddle to climb 

 through mountain passes, and to follow seldom-trodden path?. 



