ANIMAL COLONISTS 51 



purchasing British cattle compete in lavish expenditure 

 in their zeal for an inheritance in the beasts, birds, and 

 fishes of our good country. 



This colonization by animals has had a settled order 

 of time, corresponding fairly closely with the social 

 evolution of the British and foreign possessions to 

 which they have been involuntary migrants. The 

 ' pioneer animals/ like the first colonists, have often 

 been rather a ' rough lot.' Times were bad after the 

 great war, and our farmers did not own one-twentieth 

 part of the fine pedigree stock now so plentiful in this 

 country. But the first colonizing animals had to be of 

 the useful sort, beasts of burden or for food, if not the 

 best, then the best which could be got. So the settlers 

 in Australia, the backwoods of Canada, and Cape Colony 

 and Natal, had for their first animal population a prolific 

 and hardy, but not a high-bred class of English stock. 

 There were abundance of sheep, of cattle, of fowls, and 

 some British horses. The ancestors of the animal 

 colonists of New Zealand, now represented by twenty 

 millions of sheep and cattle alone, were imported later, 

 and from more carefully selected stock, than those first 

 taken to the older colonies. Meantime, the latter had 

 reached the stage of prosperity in which it pays not 

 only to possess many flocks and herds, but also to have 

 them of high quality. Sheep, cattle, and horses were 

 improved by the best English blood that money could 



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