102 MANUAL OF FARM ANIMALS 



may not be the one that suits his fancy best or even the one that 

 is best suited to the district. 



Under the system suggested, the buyer of any particular type 

 or breed should be able to go to a district noted for the produc- 

 tion of the class of animal required and there find it in sufficient 

 numbers, uniform in type and quality, to meet all needs. Could 

 this be done, buyers would save much time and expense and 

 would be ready and willing to pay better prices for the full supply 

 of horses thus easily found. 



Soundness. — It is of great importance that the stallion should 

 be free from all forms of unsoundness or disease that are heredi- 

 tary, transmissible, or communicable to the offspring. It is 

 equally important that the mares bred to him should be sound 

 in the same way, for not until both mare and stallion used for 

 breeding purposes are free from unsoundness can we hope to 

 raise the excellence of our horses to the degree possible as the 

 result of intelligent breeding and development. 



Many imported and home-bred stallions are unsound and 

 transmit to their progeny the predisposition to like unsoundness. 

 This is equally true of mares used for breeding purposes, as many 

 breeders have fallen into the grievous way of considering any 

 broken-down, halt, maimed, blind, or otherwise unsound mare 

 fit for breeding purposes when no longer able to work. 



THE STALLION 



The stallion is of prime importance in horse-breeding. We 

 have already seen that the male is concerned with many more 

 individual offspring in a given season than the female and that 

 his influence is much more extensive because of the increased 

 number he influences. To secure the improvement in the horses 

 of a given community through the females would require the 

 use of fifty or more superior mares to accomplish the same result 

 as might be secured by the use of a single stallion, and even then 

 there would be less uniformity in the progeny. This has no 



