WALKING HORSES.

New Zealand Times, Volume XXXIII, Issue 5237, 5 January 1878, Page 2 (Supplement)

WALKING HORSES.

Everybody concedes that there is no gait which so greatly adds to the actual value of the horse as a fast walk, and yet it is notorious that there is no gait so little cultivated. Even our agricultural societies, that are supposed to especially foster the improvement of our domestic animals iu all useful qualities, persistently ignore this, the most valuable of all gaits in the horse. A premium for the fastest walking horse is very rarely offered, and when there is such a thing, the amount is so insignificant as to attract no attention ; while hundreds, and in many cases thousands, of dollars were offered for trials of speed at the faster and less useful gaits. Tills is not as it should be. We have racing associations all over the country, which offer enormous purses for trotting and running, thus furnishing abundant stimulus for improvement in that direction and it is the especial provision of our agricultural societies to stimulate improvement in the horse that is really the most valuable for agricultural purposes, and in that gait which is best adapted to the use to which he is put. The walk is the gait which the horse must assume when drawing the plough, the harrow, the reaping machine, or when performing a long journey on the road ; and here the superiority of a pair of fast walkers, over those of a moping, ox-like gait is apparent. A horse that can walk off on the road at the rate of five miles an hour, and at a correspondingly rapid gait when harnessed to the plough or harrow, is a treasure to a farmer ; yet such horses are more rare than 2'30 trotters. There is no reason why this should be the case. The trouble is not so much from lack of capacity for fast walking iu most of our horses as it is from a failure to cultivate that gait. The rage among the hoys, stablehands, and eveu staid and sober farmers, is for speed ; and as soon as the colt is broken he must be made to trot. Ho is taught at once to understand that the walk is a gait to he resorted to only when time is a matter of no consequence, and thus many a naturally fast walker becomes, from use, a very slow one. If as much pains were taken in developing and breeding for increased speed at the walking gait as is now taken for breeding for trotting, we should soon have very many horses that -could walk five miles per hour, and horses that could walk a mile on the road in ten minutes, or six miles per hour, would bo as often met with as trotters that can go ten miles an hour for any considerable length of time. —American paper.