THE HORSE BUSINESS.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XXVIII, Issue 3600, 21 November 1905, Page 4

THE HORSE BUSINESS.

ThOße Who Raise the nijrhl Sort of ▲hlbmilm Hare Never Yet M«d« « Pallore of It.

At the round-up institute in Wisconsin last year, H. A. Briggs, an extensive breeder of that state, gave the following good advice in regard to the brood mare,: If ybu are going to raise draft horses see what kind of brood mare you have. Don’t try to raise a draft horse from a 1,000 or 1,100-pound trotting mare. Select your largest mares and cross them with the breed you like best, a pure-bred draft horse, whether he is imported or American bred, you must get size and quality. If you are going to breed carriage or coach horses, select your mares that have size and quality, and cross them with the very best carriage horse you can. lam not going to point out the particular breed j you should have. Among our American , trotters we can get as good a type ox coach horse as there is in the world, if we look to size and quality, but there j are not enough of them. If American people had paid as much attention to producing good carriage horses as they have to producing speed, and speed alone, we would have the best coach and carriage horses of any nation in the world, and we would have a national reputation for producing carriage horses equal to the one we have had for producing little trotters. That has been the one great trouble with the men who have been raising - trotting horses, they have lost sight of e'erything except the speed and the speed pedigree, and the result in many cases has been that not one in 25 has been fit to put on the market to sell for any kind of legitimate use. Get the idea of trying to raise trotting horses out of your head; if he can't do anything but trot you do not want him, because you would do more harm to yourself and your family in a financial and a moral way than anything you can do on the farm. But if you have a good standard trotting mare, and can crosa her with a good French or German coach or standard bred horse you can make money in raising coach or carriage horses. Such horses are selling all the way from $l3O to $1,500. They weigh from 1,150 to 1,250 pounds, and stand from 15% to 18 hands high, with all of the style and nice, easy action that you can get in a horse, not a low shuffling gait, but one that gets his feet up and shows nice knee action and nice hock action. That will give you an idea of the kind of horse that I think is advisable for the farmer to raise. You may have the very best breeds of either one of these kinds, and if you neglect feed you will have the veriest scrub that ever grew on a Wisconsin farm.