BREED OF RACEHORSES DETERIORATING.

Poverty Bay Standard, Volume IX, Issue 912, 26 January 1881, Page 2

BREED OF RACEHORSES DETERIORATING.

These is a very strong impression among some experts in the matter that the present fine breeding of racers is deteriorating that class of horses. It will be remembered that the Duke of Westminster’s Bend d’Or wrested the Derby from Robert the Devil on the post, and it was generally believed that another few yards would have seen his defeat. The complete collapse afterwards of the Duke’s horse at Doncaster led at once to a discussion on the stamina of the English racehorse. Mr. Wilfred Blunt, an Arabian traveller, has been urging the stewards of the jockey club to restore the weight for age races for horses exclusively of Arabian blood. While ridiculing the idea of Admiral Rouse, that a secondclass English thoroughbred could give five stone to the best Arabian, and

beat him one mile or twenty, he confesses “next to the Arabian the English is the finest bred horse in the world, and of all now the fastest.” Mr. Blunt asserts that the speed comes from the Arab blood, and he says with anything like the same process of selection, the pure bred Arabian would beat the impure. For two centuries Newmarket has been breeding a “ galloping machinebut the organism has become so delicate as to be upset by the slightest cause, As a sire he considers the constitution of the English racehorse unsatisfactory ; in spite of his size his back and loins are weak for a weight-carrier, his action wants finish, his shape is far from perfect, and his temper uncertain. The thoroughbred Arab is in nine cases out of ten, sounder in wind and limb, his strength is one-third again as much

as any horse of his size, his beauty universally conceded, and his temper admirable. As a racehorse, a sire for hunters, but particularly as a breeder of carriage stock, Mr. Blunt recommends the Arab. The horse he would advise for introduction for breeding purposes is the thoroughbred Anazeh Kehilan. Much may be due to the continuous process of perfecting; the theoretical object of English horseracing, the improvement of English horseflesh in general, will be lost sight of if the racehorse becomes so delicate as to be like the outrigger boat, useless for any purposes but one, and liable to all sorts of disarrangements.