HORSE BUYING AND BREEDING IN SOUTH AFRICA. 
549 
a limited contract at first. If he performs that thoroughly satisfactori¬ 
ly, both as to time of delivery and quality of the animals, then give him 
the whole business. If you happen to know of thoroughly reliable 
agents to work the various horse breeding districts you might work 
through them confining each to his own district, but if, as was our case, 
you were obliged to start working from head-quarters, two or three 
contractors with their agents bidding against each other simply put 
the prices up and it became towards the end of the contract most diffi¬ 
cult to get the horses at all. It is a mistake too I think, to deal with 
anyone (except in quite a small way) who has not command of a fair 
amount of capital. Directly a contract is given out it is known who 
has got it, and the big men whether they want horses or not, will gener¬ 
ally do all in their power to prevent the smaller men fulfilling their 
contract by buying against them, the consequence being great delay in 
the completion of the business in hand. This happened to us on sever¬ 
al occasions with small contractors chosen before our arrival. Besides 
the delay much inconvenience and waste of public money is caused 
when the inspecting officer, with veterinary surgeon and farrier, is kept 
waiting about to see a few animals which ought to have been delivered 
a week before. 
The last occasion on which horses had been bought in large quan¬ 
tities was for Plumer’s force which went up to assist in quelling the 
Matabele rebellion. Then i,ioocobs 14*2 to 15 hands were brought in 
14 days (10th—25th April) at a price of £18. It was a better time to 
find horses than August, when the horses have been subsisting on the 
winter veldt, and there was I fancy, on that occasion, very little veter¬ 
inary examination. Anything that could trot decently sound was 
taken. However, these animals did their work well. They had to march 
600 miles, carrying about 16 stone in less than 40 days, and though 
horse sickness was very prevalent in the district, their casualties were 
only 88 out of 1,100 ; I must add that on this occasion unbroken horses 
were taken, and there were I believe some funny sights as well as bro¬ 
ken bones at the beginning of the march. 
Any Englishman* fond of horses, landing in South Africa at the Cape 
will form a poor idea of the colonial horse. You hardly see a decent 
horse in the streets. The “ rips ” driven by the Malay cab drivers 
in their white hansoms (all named) look as they stand on the rank, 
hardly able to keep on their legs, but like the South African horse 
generally, they are better than they look, and friends who have tested 
them on long excursions, tell me that their endurance is surprising. 
A cart horse you practically never see. The drays and trollies 
which in London are pulled by one stalwart shire, are here drawn by a 
team of four mules^ There is no doubt that the Cape horse must 
have sadly deteriorated since the days when the Indian Government 
used to draw its best remounts from the Colony. Carlessness in 
breeding has brought the size down so that now the horse of the 
country is a cob of about 14.2, generally with indifferent shoulders, 
and inclined to be flat sided but able to carry weight for long distances 
at his own pace, on the roughest of rations so that for Mounted Infant- 
