150 HUNTING 



the farmer has to be out of his money by breeding 

 bullocks for a longer time than by breeding horses. 

 A bullock is not fit for the butcher till he has attained 

 from three to four years, and the cost of rearing him 

 and fattening him for the market is equal to that of 

 rearing a horse. Then mark the result ! A good 

 bullock when fattened — and the process of fattening 

 takes six months — is worth from £25 to j£30. An 

 inferior hunter of the same age is worth the same sum ; 

 a moderate hunter is worth from £75 to £100 ; and a 

 first-rate hunter will fetch from £150 to £200, and 

 even more. By the term hunter in this last paragraph 

 we mean a horse bred for hunting purposes. The 

 breeding of thoroughbred stock and of shire horses is 

 not within the scope of this chapter. 



These figures tell us that the breeding and rearing 

 of hunters ought to be profitable, if pursued with due 

 care on the right lines, and the incontrovertible fact 

 that no country in the world can breed horses of 

 equal value with those of the United Kingdom ought 

 to operate as an additional stimulus to horse-breeding. 

 Moreover, we are convinced that the failures which are 

 put down to bad luck are invariably the fault of the 

 breeder or his servants. Of course, infallible rules 

 cannot be established for breeding until certain causes 

 are defined, which would insure certain results in 

 reference to the procreation of animals; but discrep- 

 ancies, which are frequently set down to the caprice 

 of Nature, may often be accounted for if people will 

 only take the trouble to search deep enough for the 

 cause. Men breed from inferior, leggy, bad-actioned, 



