In the South, particularly in Virginia, the best traditions of the hunting field have been upheld since the earliest times, and there is the home of the best hunting to be had in this country. There has been as yet no invasion by barbed wire. The country has not been exploited or commercialized, and the farmers are of an entirely different class from those to be found in the neighborhood of the great cities or in the North. As a general rule they are heartily in sympathy with hunting; many of them follow the hounds and breed hunters, and even use them on their farms. In fact, the hunter is the general type of horse to be found throughout that section of the country.
Show Winner in Park Hack Classes (Sonia)
The hunter is the one kind of mount for a woman in which beauty, though desirable, is not a requisite. Rather does one seek in hunters breeding, courage, and intelligence, and the greatest of these is intelligence. The good hunter will show a long neck, withers standing well back, and forelegs well forward of the girth. He should have sloping shoulders and great depth of chest. In fact, his chest should be so deep that when you look at him his legs should not appear as long as they are. He should have strong quarters, and there is no valid objection to their being “ragged,” for he needs great power in his quarters to carry him over the jumps. Of course, one may recall many instances of light-weight thoroughbreds of beautiful conformation who are admirable hunters, but they cannot be hunted every day over a heavy country. That a hunter is to be ridden by a woman, is no reason why his appearance should be ladylike. The extra weight of a side-saddle and the unevenness of the distribution of the rider’s weight on his back, make it necessary that a woman’s hunter should be quite as large and powerful as a man’s. The recognized type of hunter is close to the thoroughbred and quite distinct from the harness horse. Without exception, all hunters have more or less thoroughbred blood, though sometimes we have to go unexpectedly far
back to find it. Many of them are three-quarter bred, and some have as little as one-quarter, or even an eighth or a sixteenth. As for their blood, there is no recognized standard of breeding. Some of the best jumpers have come from trotting stock, some from hackney stock, and some even have appeared, as it were, by accident in stock of no recognized
breeding at all, and the qualities that go to make a hunter cannot be found with any certainty through breeding. The principal qualification of a hunter is that he should jump, and jumping is something that seems to be born in individual horses, and to depend not so much on their breeding as upon the union of courage with a certain conformation.
High-stepping Park Hack (Roslyn)
An Old-fashioned Combination Type (Warwick)