The Shetland pony is almost more conspicuous in the simple farming economy of his own Islands than other horses are in British agriculture. He has been the constant theme of travellers and dwellers in Shetland; and their references show that he has been a dominant interest there throughout the whole known history of his home. The statements which have already been quoted are continued and corroborated up to our own day; and everywhere we find the same description of the ponies—their small size and their courage and endurance.[27]
Typical of many accounts of them is that given by Campbell in 1750. “There are little horses in this Island, which the Inhabitants call Shelties; they are so very small that one may lay his leg over them from the ground; but notwithstanding their Smallness they are both strong and active, and live many years, even till they are blind with Age: I have heard say, some of them live till they are upwards of thirty, and they are never kept within Doors, but are foaled in the Fields, live in the Fields, and die in the Fields. They do little Work, unless it be to carry some Sea Weed, to dung the Ground in the Seed-Time. There is no Horse-hire.”[28]
Throughout the narratives of eye-witnesses we find everywhere the fact that the ponies are reared and kept in conditions of great hardship. A Highland Society’s report in 1801 tells us that “the horses live in the open fields, summer and winter, night and day, and never get a mouthful except what they can gather, not even when the ground is covered with snow. At the season of labour they are, of consequence, miserable, lean, and weak; so late as the middle of June they are little else than skin and bone, covered with long hair like goats, yet, even in that situation, their spirit is astonishingly great.”[29]
“They would be more numerous,” says Gifford, “if in any way cared for; but they lie out in the open fields summer and winter, and get no food but what they can find for themselves; so in bad winters many of them die with hunger and cold. It will, no doubt, be wondered at by strangers that so little care is taken about these sheep and horses which are so useful and beneficial; the reason whereof is, that the poor inhabitants, having used their utmost endeavours, can scarce find food and shelter for their oxen and cows, without which they could not live; and in hard winters many of them die for want of fodder, so they have none to bestow on their sheep and horses, until they find more time to improve the land.”[30]
BY THE VOE.
It should perhaps be kept in mind, as a qualification of these comments, that while dependent on some degree of help in finding food in winter, and especially so in the poorer parts of Shetland, the pony is much less in need of shelter than most other animals, and appears, indeed, to thrive much better even when he is exposed to severe weather conditions than when he is kept indoors. But the lot of the Island pony is still a hard one in the long winters, when the scanty livelihood which he can gather on the mosses, by the dyke-sides, and on the sea-shore is but poorly supplemented by the occasional sheaf of oats which is all that his owner can usually allow him.
The great majority of the ponies in the Islands are in the hands of crofters, either owned by them or held on the system of “halvers,” under which merchants or others supply brood mares in return for a half interest in their progeny.
The mares nursing foals are kept usually about the croft until their foals are old enough to follow them to the “Scathold”; other ponies spend their whole summer in the hills, returning to the nearer fields, after the crops are cleared, when the approach of winter makes some additional food necessary.