Welsh Ponies and Cobs. 
53 
Recommendation of Mountain and Moorland 
Commissioners, 1912. 
On the fulfilment of certain conditions, a number of 51. 
premiums for approved pony sires turned out upon the 
Commons were recommended by the Mountain and Moorland 
Pony Commissioners. At the outset of the formation of pony 
associations the initial difficulty experienced has always been 
the raising of a sum of money requisite to buy such animals, 
but as these premiums are to be of annual recurrence it is 
estimated that after five or six years duty on the hills, a good 
pony would about earn his original cost. This should be an 
incentive, especially to a judicious purchaser, nor will the 
obvious necessity of occasional changes discount the advantages 
of the annual five pound note. 
Another suggestion with regard to the mares and filly foals 
put forward by the Commissioners was the giving of premiums 
to young mares until foaiing. The method of awarding this 
prize money was to be that each filly foal should receive 11. ; in 
the two succeeding years 30s., and upon the day she appeared 
with foal at foot, so long as she was not more than six years of 
age, a bonus of 4 1. A good filly foal will thus have earned SI. 
by the time she has come to breeding maturity, an incentive 
surely to the hill pony breeders. 
A few words of caution to the small breeder will not be 
out of place. If the owner of the filly foal, fathered by the 
newly acquired premium pony, sells to the first buyer that comes 
along the whole object of the scheme will be nullified. The 
pony owner will not only lose the first-fruits of his new venture 
but he will have disposed of the animal which should go to make 
his stud remunerative, for to get rid of the improved fillies is not 
the way to breed up a first-class stud of ponies. Unless the 
new race of improved brood mares are jealously kept at home to 
breed for several generations, all other measures taken in the 
cause of betterment can be but labour lost, and the rate of 
progress will be nil. Ponies cannot be grown like potatoes. 
Pony breeding processes require patience on the part of the 
farmer if he really wishes to build up a breed on improved and 
sure foundations, and this little restraint will eventually repay 
him a hundred fold. 
The Welsh farmer should think of the practice of the 
breeders of Arabs which has been going on for two thousand 
years. They have always registered on parchment the date of 
birth and the breeding of their foals, and jealously safe- 
guarded the continuance of the strain, by refusing to part with 
the mother mares. Of such importance was this deemed that 
Mahomet embodied in the Koran an exhortation to his faithful 
