CHAPTER IV 



THE MANAGEMENT OF LIGHT 

 HORSES 



By W. SCARTII DIXON 



THE BROOD MARE AND YOUNG STOCK 



One frequently hears it stated, and sometimes with great em- 

 phasis, as if it were an indisputable fact, that the breeding of light 

 horses is unprofitable to the farmer. There cannot be a greater 

 fallacy. Breeding light horses under the conditions that too fre- 

 quently prevail is undoubtedly a risky business; it could scarcely 

 fail to be otherwise. It would, perhaps, be an exaggeration to say 

 that the light horses on an ordinary farm are neglected; it is no 

 exaggeration to say that if the other stock on the farm were treated 

 in exactly the same way as the light horses, the profits attendant 

 on breeding them would be reduced to a minimum. 



At a busy time — and busy times crowd upon one another 

 rapidly at certain periods of the year — what is everyone's business 

 becomes no one's business. The care of the light horses is passed 

 on from one to another till it rests with the least responsible of the 

 farm servants. This is no exaggeration, I have seen it scores of 

 times; and there is only one remedy for it, the close personal 

 supervision of the master. 



Concrete examples are better than whole pages of generalization, 

 and I will give two which came under my own personal knowledge 

 as examples of the profit which can be made out of light-horse 

 breeding. A little over a quarter of a century ago there lived at 

 Wilstrop, near York, a man named George Easby, whose name is 

 written large in the horse-breeding annals of his time. He married 

 a neighbour's daughter, and on the wedding morning his father-in- 

 law told him he had no money to give the bride, but that he would 

 give her a young brood mare, which was perhaps as good as a 

 dowry. The brood mare proved very much better than any dowry 

 that could have been looked for from a m&n farming a compara- 



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