CHAPTER IX. 

 BREEDING 



Uncertainty of breeding thoroughbreds — Unaccountable barrenness in mares — 

 Proportion of foals to mares — Half-bred foals more hardy — Practice of early 

 stinting — The result of two-year-old racing — Noted two-year-old winners — 

 Four-figure yearlings — A big lottery — The prizes — La Fleche, Doncaster, and 

 St. Simon — Table of the failures — Wealthy owners the cause of high prices — 

 How they go to work at sales — No yearling worth more than i,ooo guineas — 

 Fashionable blood — The figure system condemned — Bargains in ready-made 

 racehorses — Good ones bought out of Selling Plates — Dispersal of bigl'studs 

 and private sales. 



IT is acknowledged that breeders of thoroughbred stock, 

 more especially public breeders {i.e. breeders for sale), 

 obtain less satisfactory results, in point of numbers, than do 

 breeders of hunters, hackneys, or those who deal with any 

 description of half-bred equine stock. A Yorkshire farmer 

 who stints half a dozen mares every year to the local 

 thoroughbred stallion, with a view to selling the produce at 

 four years old as hunters, is disappointed if he has not four 

 or five young horses to dispose of at the right time ; but the 

 owner of a stud devoted solely to the thoroughbred does 

 well if two of every three foals can be sent to the trainer 

 when eighteen months old, or, in the case of a public breeder, 

 to the hammer a few months earlier. That thoroughbred 

 mares are more often barren than half-bred ones seems to be 

 the case, and the pages of a stud book tell us that many 

 mares who were capable of winning races when in training 

 turn out dismal failures at the stud. It sometimes happens 

 that merit in the mare lies dormant for a generation ; and 

 the daughter of a famous mare occasionally gives birth to 

 a filly foal who, though of no value herself for winning races, 

 becomes in time the dam of one or more good winners. 



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