Horses for Farmers.

Te Aroha News, Volume IV, Issue 174, 16 October 1886, Page 3 (Supplement)

Horses for Farmers.

At a meeting of farmers held in New England Agricultural Hall, Boston, J. E. Russell, Secretary of the Massachusetts State Board of Agriculture, spoke very sensibly on the breeding of horses. Of the Morgan horses, so well known and popular in America, he said : I remember, as a boy, those shortcoupled, short jointed, full-breasted, finebeaded, pointed fox-eared horses, weighing from 950 to ] ,000 pounds, rarely more than lo£ hands high, not quite enough, but of splendid and enduring qualities, with a domesticity of character that I have never seen or known equalled in any family of horses. What has become of them ? In the first place, I have already said that it was a family of 'horses, and that it was a family in which the blood was all in the male line. There wa«» no re-inforcement of anything to keep that family running over two or three generations. I have, within two or three years, heard a man pretend that he had a Morgan stallion. He made a great deal of public noticeof it, and I ventured to say that there was no such thing as a Morgan stallion in existence any more than any such thing as the original Smith, or the original Adams or any other progenitor. We had a little discussion about it and we carried the family back eight removes. Now you begin, for instance, with the first cross. The foal from the first cross is one-half Morgan The second cross is i, the next &, the next 1-16, the next 1-32, , the next 1-64, the next 1-128, ther.ext 1-256 part. Where is your Morgan stock after it haj=f gone through so many changes ? Your name is there but your blood is gone. The blood of any popular sire* .where there is nothing but a family and not a race, is gone. We have heard of the old English stock, but we have not got the blood of any original progenitor. Lt is divided up and lost in the" crosses. So it is with the Morgans. The blood has not had any re- J inforcement, and, therefore, the family never could run beyond a very short time "without giving out. The docility of the Morgan horse, or the domesticity of which I have spoken, has always convinced me that the original Morgan horse had a strong cross of the Arab blood. He was like the desert breed in his well-known qualities/ and he had some blood in him that came from a race of antiquity, or it would not have held out as -it did. The pedigree of Justin Morgan i 3 1 all based upon guessing, and the guesses were made forty years after the stout little stattion was dead ; and those who knew him looked back through a long vista of memory > clouded with the mists of age. We have as »• good a right to guess as our predecessors. and it has always seemed to me that not .•stress enough has heen laid upon the interesting fact that a pure Aral), the celebrated Lindeay'g Arabian i .covered mares in i the vicinity of Pomfret and Hartford, Con'i necticut, for several years, 'between 1766 and' 1775. Twenty-five years oi> so 1 after- ' wards Justin Morgan 'came into the world - to found among the hills, at Vermont; a •new ifamiljr of horses,' with the sweet and ..fcoble .traits of the horse" that shares' the tent and the iood.of the wandering children , * >df the desert;' > I have always believed' that, ' ' ds* W waß foaled about tWenty' miles from ''tbe country in Cohnecticut.thot had' been the home of the Lindsay Arab, Justin

M6Vgan t mu3trlijive been 'ah' in 1 bred d^cehd- 1 ant of ttie fampus' horse ttiatjGeneral Wash-- ' ingt'on caused to 'be removed to Virginia. 0 pedigrees ( in qur t road horses, whenjihey, ga back twenty.five years, are, as mystical, as the history of, the [heathen' ,gods. There is a name that has been made much of , in the pedigree of horB.es, brought from Maine ; I refer to Bush's Messenger. Tliis was a horse owned by, P.hilo Busty fyom whom he was named. , Bush cared littjle for road or trotting horses; he r,, was," ,a , tiainer of thoroughbred race-liQrses, and when I knew him twenty years ago he, had, charge of the race-horses belonging to Leonard Jerome, He told me that the horae called Bush's Messenger was named Messenger by him, and he had not the least knowledge, of the horse's origin, nor, a high opinion of his value j yet this horse, for years, was cpnsidered the last repository of the blood of | imported Messenger, and his name is a redletter in many of the trotting pedigrees. With regard to the care . of colts, Mr Russell said : When a colt is born on a farm, every farmer ought to kno^r how to treat his mare so as to increase her flow of milk. He should give the colt all the nutrition that is possible, and keep it growing as well as he can "while it is still upon the dam's udder.' Many of these old mares are poor milkers, arid all that can be done should be" done to increase the flow of milk, and that is a matter that all farmers under stand thoroughly in dealing with their cows. ■ The same thing that produces a good flow of milk in a cow will produce a good flow in a mare. If the mare is put where the colt can get at the feed, within two or three weeks the colt will be eating* freely of bruised oats and sweet hay. It is an old English proverb that ha'f a horse goes down his throat. There is also another proverb that the breed is in the mouth. This means that no matter how well you may feed your horse, the breed will not amount to anything unless the animal has good appetite and digestion. You must have a good appetite in the animal if you ever expect to have stamina and vigour of constitution. A colt wants to be kept eating and growing and exercising, and anything except fatrening, so long as he has a time assigned him by nature to grow. You can starve an old horse. You can turn him out somewhere upon a barren pasture or a rough hillside to fight flies in the summer and battle with the elements, and if you bring him back in the fall and put him into the barn and give him good keeping, you can get him in good condition again, and nature will restore the waste and make him a strong horse again. But if you stint a young animal during the growing period of life, you have lost the precious time that will never again come to you. Thia opportunity lost can never be regained. "When you have once made a stunted animal, you tjan never again make the both and stature that nature would have allowed if you had given generous feed. One of the commonest things in this commonwealth is to have men point to a well-grown yearling colt raised on their farm, ana say there is a splendid colt that never had a particle of grain in his life. Their boast is never true They think that it is a credit that no grain has been fed. It would be like a man pointing to his child and telling how cheaply he had raised him Every boy ought to have abundance to eat ; and it is so with the animals about our home. It reminds me of what a man said about religion — that he had enjoyed religion for twenty-five years, and it hadn't co^t him twenty-five cents. The getting something for nothing is a very fallacious doctrine, and it never works well in breeding horses. There is no such thing as making horses without grain and without care and vigilance, if you expect to get any that are worth raising. There is nothing that is worth having that you can get without a cost.