HORSE BUYING AND BREEDING IN SOUTH AFRICA. 551 
rider, with the best of manners. 
The transport of the country is usually carried on by teams of oxen, 
a team of eight span being the usual number. For faster work, mules 
are employed, mule breeding being carried cn largely near Malmes¬ 
bury and in all the horse breeding districts. The slowest and cheap¬ 
est form of transport animal is the donkey, which I did not often see 
used. 
The chief enemy to horse flesh in the 1 Cape Peninsula is a form of 
biliary fever which most animals suffer from more or less when first 
landed. Want of lime in the soil and water also brings on a serious 
complaint, called ‘ oster porosis 5 rotting of the bone. A large number 
of our South American remounts were attacked by it, and it is very 
prevalent on the Randt. Ulceration of the bones of the face and fet¬ 
lock joints is the most common sympton, but sometimes the spine it¬ 
self is affected. A Johannesburg trainer showed me one horse suffer¬ 
ing from it, which could not bear you to touch his back along the 
ridge of the spine, on either side of which the hair was coming off, 
and he informed me that he had lately under his charge, a horse 
which suffering from this disease, snapped his back in the stable for 
no other reason. Post-mortem examination showed the spine to be 
quite rotten. His only remedy, a kill or cure one, was turning the 
horse out on fresh veldt (possessing lime) for a year. Vet.-Lieut 
Lane, A.V.D., treated apparently successfully several bad cases at the 
Remount Depot, Stellenbosch, and at Wynberg, but his opinion was 
that no horse which had had the disease badly would ever stand hard 
work. 
The most malignant enemy however to horses in South Africa is a 
disease peculiar to that sub-continent; horse sickness, a malady similar 
in many ways to pleuro-pneumonia in cattle, yearly makes enormous 
ravages in certain districts. 
It is most fatal in Rhodesia, where many men of experience have 
told me that not more than 5 per cent, of unstabled horses survive 
the months from January to May. It is however, also prevalent in 
the Transvaal and Natal, and I believe occasionally visits at uncertain 
intervals, every horse-breeding district. 
The man of science who can discover the means of inoculating 
against this pest will confer an untold boon on the South African 
farmer. An old transport rider who used to run the mails from the 
Orange River to Pretoria (a very bad district for horse sickness) told 
me that he avoided it almost entirely by never allowing his horses 
and mules to graze on the veldt during the rainy months. Directly 
they were out-spanned,^ crop was given them in nosebags, and the 
nosebags left on. If this is true, and I have no reason to doubt it, it 
looks as if the microbe thrived on the moisture of the veldt grass at 
that period of the year, which theory is borne out by the fact that 
stabled horses are rarely attacked. 
My transport riding friend, alluded to above, assured me that in the 
pre-railway day he had to regularly do 250 miles a week, often travel¬ 
ling 50 miles without water carrying the mails up to Pretoria. He 
once with 4 mules drawing a cart carrying 3 passengers with their 
