Breeding Funk Perchcrons. 151 



cattle, sheep or horse ranchman who has thousands and 

 tens of thousands of animals under his command ? Es- 

 pecially where the ranchman has a part of his range 

 fenced and possibly supplied with buildings and pad- 

 docks can he control the breeding of his choicest ani- 

 mals, kept separately during the rutting sea-son and the 

 season of giving birth to their young. Our ranchmen 

 have not had a knowledge of how easily and practically 

 to keep track of their blood lines. Would not expe- 

 rience put them in possession of the necessary simple 

 plans ? 



Not one, but a number, of co-operative firms are 

 needed to improve the Percheron breed; and each of 

 the other draft breeds in like manner would serve as 

 a magnificent foundation with which similar firms 

 or associations could make profits. Profits in these un- 

 dertakings will not accrue the first or the next year, as 

 in importing the best from a county or a province in 

 Europe, but eventually the money returns and the satis- 

 faction of having thus created new wealth and of hav- 

 ing artistically built up new forms of beauty as 

 well as of intrinsic value should be incomparably 

 greater. We need a class of brush artists to paint the 

 beautiful and optimistic sides of our American country 

 life, word painters to portray the strong and delightful 

 features of our farm homes, and w.e need more breeders 

 of the highest art and broadest scientific sense to build 

 up beautiful and useful forms of horses and other ani- 

 mals. 



But in breeding draft horses we must count days' 

 work in the lives of the family of horses as the first 

 consideration. The qualities discernible in the judging 

 ring are very valuable indices of quality and even 

 of breeding value, but if each horse of a highly accred- 

 ited family could be marked as by tattooing inside the 

 ear and if his yearly records could be returned to an 

 official recorder, real life-time values would be made 

 available. The States or the United States Government 

 could well afford to experiment to see if such records 



