April, 1912 
RS peer sar 
MEE LI 
The saddle horse should be considered an indispensable adjunct to every complete American suburban home, and riding a national pastime 
AMERICAN HOMES A 
LL LN NS EE 
ND GARDENS 135 
% 
The Saddle Horse for the Country Home 
By Herbert J. Krum, Editor The Saddle and Show Horse Chronicle 
Photographs by T. C. Turner and Others 
a|S AN adjunct to the complete suburban home, 
nothing is more indispensable than the sad- 
dle horse. It forms an integral part of every 
establishment that has even the remotest 
flavor of the suburbs connected with it. 
Saddle horses are no longer used, as they 
were in early days, for a means of transportation, as they 
have been superseded by the more modern inventions of the 
motor car and the electric trolley. But, nevertheless, the 
place that the saddle horse has in the economy of modern 
affairs is one both unique and necessary, 
and from which there is not the slightest 
danger of his ever being usurped. 
The question of breeding horses, either 
as a business or as a pastime, has long 
been one which has engaged the favor and 
attention of some of the keenest minds our 
country has produced, and as regards some 
kinds of horses, especially those available 
for racing purposes, there has long at- 
tached a halo of romance and a spirit of 
mysticism born of the uncertainty of the 
results that has seemed to lend a never- 
ending fascination to the subject. The 
racing of horses, of the kind used either 
under saddle or in harness, has always 
been a most precarious sport. It is un- 
questionably true that eighty per cent. of 
the horses in the United States are bred 
at an absolute loss to the original breeder. 
The number of those horsemen who have 
achieved affluence as a result of their 
horse-breeding activities is scant in com- 
parison with those who have met disap- 
pointment and financial loss, if not utter 
ruin. Nothing in all this, however, is to 
say that the breeding of horses as a business proposition 
is not one which can be carried on with a measurable cer- 
tainty of financial profit and reward. It has seldom hap- 
pened that people who have engaged in the business of 
breeding horses have done so from any other reason than 
of innate liking of the horse himself; and it has still more 
rarely been the case that where a person has engaged in 
this work he has applied thereto any of the business prin- 
ciples which alone could make for success in this or any 
other line of human activity. It would appear axiomatic 
that there is no reason in the world why 
a person should not be able to deal in 
horses as a merchandise upon the same 
basis of profit and loss as would attach to 
any other commodity. The principles of 
selection and the operation of the laws of 
cause and effect are things that are lost 
sight of by the average person who en- 
gages in the horse business. Such persons 
have an ideal of their own which they wish 
to perpetuate regardless of any such con- 
siderations as market demand or the 
suitability of the animals if successfully 
produced for the purposes for which they 
might be exchanged for coin of the realm. 
Most unfortunately, it is true that horse 
breeding experiments are largely uncer- 
tain. Undoubtedly there is in the horse 
world a law which governs and controls 
the production of horses after their own 
kind. The great trouble with breeders 
has been that they have been unable to 
learn what the law is or in what manner 
~ 268 its operations may be controlled and made 
Every American child apould be taught manifest. 
to ride, and to ride well 
It is true that no other form of live- 
