RETURN OF THE HORSE

Dominion, Volume 35, Issue 263, 5 August 1942, Page 6

RETURN OF THE HORSE

Many Problems Faced In Dominion FEW TEAMSTERS AND SMITHS LEFT The return of the horse urged by the Minister of Transport, and supported in circulars to dairy companies by the New Zealand Dairy Board is not easy to effect, and may be long coming into operation, because the equine population has been decreasing as steadily as the number of cows has grown. A “back to the horse” committee lias already been set up in Canterbury to make a survey of the number of horses available, the harness and vehicles that can be procured,, the blacksmiths who can be employed,laud the iron that can be requisitioned for horseshoes. Similar committees are planned for other parts of the Dominion. The number of horses in New Zealand was last year estimated at 266,000, compared with 296,000 only ten years ago. The decline has been steady since 1911, and the number of horses is now the same as at the beginning of the century. On the other hand, the number of cows increased from 372,000 in 1900 to 1,780,000 last year. The opinion that the chief problem in the greater utilization of horses was not created by scarcity of the animals, but by the absence of men 1 skilled in handling them and in making their equipment, was expressed yesterday by a prominent Waikato farmer, who is a member of several local bodies and organizations connected with the dairy industry. During the last few years, he sai'd, there must have been hundreds of South Island horses sold in the North Island, with the result that many farmers owned \horses which were working full-time for only a small part of the year. He considered that if farmers could obtain harness and shoes, far greater use could be made of the horses. Even more important than that was lack of teamsters, whose art could now unfortunately be classed as lost. Driven from the roads, and from the farms by the internal combustion engine, the horse has for so many years taken a back place in the economy of the Dominion' that farriers, harnessmakers, wheelwrights, veterinarians and blacksmiths . have almost disappeared. The country smithy has become the crossroads garage. One result is that farmers are now shoeing their own horses —when shoes are available—and the price is nearly treble what it was even 15 years ago. Despite the fact that the army is largely mechanized, large numbers of horseshoes have been commandeered for military use. The peak year for horses in New Zealand was 1911, when there were 404,000, and in those days farm tractors were unknown. Thirty years later there were 11,278 agricultural tractors. Only two header harvesters were in use in 1930, but within nine years that number had risen to 500, and had increased since then.

Addressing the Otago branch of the Royal Society recently, the Otago superintendent of the Department of Agriculture, Mr. C. V. Dayus, said that it took as long to rear a bullock as to build a battleship, and that to raise a horse to working age took four years. Draught horses had come into their own again in Great Britain with prices the highest since 1920, tind Government grants for the encouragement of heavy horse breeding had been renewed in England. Several of the Australian States were also interesting themselves in the problem, but in New Zealand the Remount Subsidy Regulations of 1938, for the replenishment of numbers and the improvement of type, had been suspended.