CHAPTER XX. 



BREEDING BUSINESS DRIVERS. 



The love of show, catering to fashion and the sport- 

 ing instinct, and the desire for useful, pretty and in- 

 teresting horses have been powerful factors in breed- 

 ing drivers. While the demand is large for driving 

 horses bred for use in the family carriage, the doctor's 

 wagon, the business man's road-wagon, the lieht de- 

 livery wagon, and other vehicles there has been little 

 effort to breed directly and specifically for that clas:^ 

 of horses. The racing thought has entered into the 

 ideal nearly all along the line and insteacl of having 

 horses bred to a driver's type we have a mixed type, 

 yearly approaching more and more the grey-hound-like 

 racing type, though the tendency to breed a class of 

 drivers with more, body and less racing instinct is also 

 growing. 



While the breeding has been more especially for 

 trotting racers the proportion of really speedy ones 

 has been small, and that of really first-class drivers 

 still smaller. In the absence of any adequate plan of 

 breeding drivers with more body, more strength, more 

 toughness, more docility, more beauty, more grace and 

 more uniformity, breeders have been content while try- 

 ing to breed for the occasional speed horse to use the 

 left-overs for driving. The clear, vigorous and con- 

 tinued attempts to collect the very best blood suited 

 to founding breed's or families, which would be uni- 

 formly toppers for drivers, not racers, have been few 

 and feeble. As a result we have a racy lot of driving 

 horses for family and business use, with an occasional 

 individual standard-bred or more often grade horse, 

 which nearly meets the ideal. The trotting breed would 

 be better off if all but its best ten per cent were crow.!- 



