The Best Horse for the Farmer to Breed 137 



sex lias anything to do with it or not, bnt whenever any extra 

 good bunch of accepted gunners has been seen, only a few proved 

 to be geldings. 



The truth of the matter is that this foreign demand for so- 

 called gunners has swept away a vast number of our best and 

 most useful horses from the Middle West. Tempted by the price 

 otfered on an otherwise very dull horse market, the farmers have 

 let go of their best mares, ranging in weight from 1,200 to 1,500 

 j)0unds and in age from five to ten years. The lame, the halt 

 and the otherwise unsound we have left with us, also the slab-sided, 

 three-cornered undesirable type of those weights. Far too many 

 of the really desirable shapely chunks have been exported, and 

 more are being sold every day. 



If the war abroad continues through this year our stock of good 

 chunks bids fair to be depleted. Already it is smaller than it 

 should be. The farmers may be able to get along well enough 

 with the left-overs to do their farm work, but the most of them 

 have been selling from the top and letting go out of the country 

 the class of market horse that is, and always has been, the most 

 readily saleable and relatively the highest-priced of all our work 

 horses, recognized as a distinct class on the market. With them, 

 too, have gone the most of the heavier wagoners, and we might 

 say the best light delivery wagon horses as w^ell, because these 

 lighter delivery horses have been accepted freely for the British 

 and French cavalry services. 



There is, when all this is understood, no difficulty in answering 

 the question: Which is now the best horse for the farmer to 

 breed i By all means let him turn his attention to supplying a 

 really attractive, compactly-built, wide-ended, deep-middled, short- 

 legged chunk, weighing 1,300 to 1,500 pounds. After the trade 

 has" dropped back into its regular channels at the close of the war 

 now raging in Europe, there will be a greater price in offer for 

 the heavier sorts than for those that weigh between 1,200 and 1,300 



pounds. 



For the draft horse weighing from 1,700 to 2,000 pounds, the 

 field must always remain more or less limited. I believe that it 

 will become more and more so as time passes and the use of 

 heavy motor trucks increases. Besides, not one farmer in a 



