The importance of most careful scrutiny in selecting the progenitors of horses can never be overrated; and though in Ireland experience has proved in many instances that a good hunter can be produced from a dam which, in England, would be considered too small, too plain, the blood in both parents has invariably been of the best. The mare, or perhaps her parents, might have been half-starved—no uncommon result of the scarcity of food during many successive years of adversity among the poorer classes in the former country—but her progenitors had been large powerful animals.
As, in the due course of things, it results in time that every denomination of useful horse, excepting, perhaps, the heavy dray and cart horse breeds, is influenced by the characteristics transmitted more particularly to the powerful, enduring, moderately fleet animal properly designated the hunter, it is a subject of deep interest to the community at large to know how the latter should be produced.
The “Irish hunter” is admitted to possess in a remarkable manner the qualities most desirable in a horse of that or the generally useful class. Hardy, enduring, courageous, strong, short-legged, short-backed, long-sided, tolerably fast, but any deficiency in speed made up for by jumping power; all action, able to jump anything and everything; intuitive lovers of fencing; their sagacity such that you have only to get on their backs and leave the rest to themselves;—under ordinary circumstances it is almost impossible to throw these animals.
THE PROPER FORM
Such is the breeding that I should be inclined to cross with that of the powerful English race-horse as sire, taking blood as nearly pure as possible in both parents, for the purpose of securing valuable stock, which would in time be dispersed over the country, and replace the progeny of those weedy thorough-breds which, in Ireland especially, have done much towards the decline in power and endurance of the present generation of so-called Irish hunters. The parentage might, of course, be reversed between sire and dam.
As to the question of climate, any one really interested in discovering its possible effects might be curious to know what would characterise the produce of a high-bred English racer and Irish huntress foaled and reared in France.
As far as we can judge from the peculiarities of those horses with which we are most familiar, extremes of either heat or cold are unfavourable to the development of size; whereas, under both conditions, a vast amount of endurance seems to be natural.
The Norwegian and the Arab, differing materially in point of swiftness, are both notorious for endurance. The plodding perseverance of the first is well known; while the Arab, ridden at an even gait with a fair weight, will go with impunity a greater distance, at a rate of eighteen to twenty miles an hour, than the best European can do. In sporting language, the Arab can “stay” better than the European.