BREEDING PROBLEMS. 
BREEDING PROBLEMS AND THE ARMY. 
By Olaf Schwarzkopf, Fort Sam Houston, Texas. 
The “ Remount question/’ which suddenly appeared and seri¬ 
ously threatened the army a few years ago, has gradually devel¬ 
oped into the problem how to breed suitable cavalry horses in our 
country. Both questions have been arousing such widespread in¬ 
terest, and they have led to so diverse discussions in army service 
journals and agricultural papers, that they have become of the 
deepest concern to the army veterinarian, and must need also 1 the 
attention of all veterinarians practicing in horse-breeding dis¬ 
tricts. 
It is the birthright of our people and the tendency of our 
government to meet emergencies by sporadic and spasmodic ef¬ 
forts, and these two problems are no exception, inasmuch as they 
were allowed to come upon us abruptly and are now in danger of 
being met with hastily. 
Credit is due to the army veterinarian, that he was the first 
to foresee the unavoidable shortage of suitable remounts for our 
cavalry, little as this is known. It was more than fifteen years 
ago when some of our colleagues in the service, now dead, as 
well as others still living, sounded an early warning, but this re¬ 
mained unheeded by the war department and the horse-breeders 
generally. 
Things had to< come the way they did. In the nineties horse- 
breeding, helter-skelter, uncontrolled, unguided or misguided 
horse-breeding, all were irrational, produced an oversupply of 
horses of inferior quality, which resulted in the dropping of 
prices so low that they became practically worthless. Veterina¬ 
rians then practicing well remember that a charge of two dollars 
for a vist to a sick horse was considered exorbitant, the owner, 
estimating the value of his $250 horse at about $25, and he pre¬ 
ferred to let him die rather than pay such a fee. People in many 
sections of the country did not know what to do with all the 
horses, and thousands were butchered, ostensibly for export, 
while other thousands were simply shot in the prairies to preserve 
the grass for cattle and sheep, or the carasses were fed to hogs. 
It was an extreme that had been reached, and when the re¬ 
action set in, the pendulum swung towards the other extreme: 
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