MOSTLY FALLACIOUS

Evening Post, Volume CXIX, Issue 78, 2 April 1935, Page 6

MOSTLY FALLACIOUS

HORSE-BREEDING SYSTEMS The prominent English veterinary surgeon so well known by his pen-name "iliinkato" has no particular faith in the various theories that are constantly brought'forward as royal roads to success ill horse-breeding, and never forgets to spy so. In a recent issue of the "Sp.orting Chronicle" he discusses "Grooves and Systems," and has very little to say in favour of any. Breeders from time to time have been advised to follow many grooves and systems, some useful in their way and others entirely fallacious, he writes. Coming in the latter category is the ridiculous Same-Parental-Age System, the sponsors of which are so dense that they have never yet discovered that parity and disparity in parental ages have the same incidence for the very worst horses in the Stud Book as for the highest grades. Another fallacious doctrine taught by a few misguided disciples of Weissman is that such diseases and defects as roaring, whistling, stringhalt,'blood-vessel breaking, side-bone, true ring-bone, and navieular disease are not and cannot be hereditary. The late Sir Theodore Andrea Cook went to the other extreme and was inclined to take the view that the measurements of the component parts of the skeletons pf Eclipse, Touchstone, Hermit, St. Simon, Persimmon, and Ormonde would afford information concerning the physiological qualities of those celebrities and their descendants: A wag named this "the deadbone system." Then there is the figure system of Bruce Lowe. The figures, as an index to female stirps, and, if followed up, to in or out breeding, are useful guides, but, applied in the way advised by Bruce Lowe, they are valueless in that members of.'a family bearing any figure show wide variation in physical and physiological characters and qualities. Bruce Lowe's theories centred on the false premise. that members of a female stirp retain, unaltered through endless generations, the characteristics which he assigned to the taproot mare. When confronted by the wide difference in many own brothers- or' own sisters, he tried to explain these, happenings by the ancient and discredited, doctrine of previous sire influence or saturation.