TRAINING ALL THE YEAR.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 11400, 18 April 1899, Page 3

TRAINING ALL THE YEAR.

Little is the good of writing and talking of the deterioration of our thoroughbred, or of' asking the jockey club to establish numerous- compulsory long-distance races, nays a writer in Sporting Life, if the training: of that thoroughbred in its youth ■is to keep on all the year round, as lias been the custom of late years'. In years gone by, when we used to ■have frost and a. month or six weeks' skat.ing ill its proper season, when Christmas was .Christmas and Winter was Winter, Nature itself played the great and important port •which common sen6e in the human being has .lately failed to substitute. Horses do grow, certainly, when not. too hard worked and '■well fed, but it is in the rest of winter when we look for a two-year-old growing into a ,fine three-year-old and a three-year-old maturing into a powerful four-year-old. Except in a few stables such as those of Marsh, at Egerton House, and John Porter, at itingselere, this is not now seen. Training goes on all the year, because Nature of late years has not intervened to stop it, and what is its result? Two-year-olds come out two-year-olds still, or if you like it better, a very inferior three-year-old, little if any better than ho was as a two-year-old in the preceding autumn, and three-year-olds hardly reach four-year-olds at all. Our cup horses are gone, and the classic race 3 fall -to horses that are rested through the winter, and to stables that rest them and give them time to mature. We see foals grow more in three months than they do in the other nine, and it is the same with two-year-olds and three-year-olds; and it is when they start to fill out and do well that this rapid growth takes place. It seems to be overlooked, however, that the art of training is the converting soft muscular tissues into catgut, and in that process the whole of the internal organs share in a greater degree than the outside, and if young horses are always to be kept in that state, it is only reasonable to allow that they must suffer somewhere, either in a weakening of the constitution and stamina, or in bone and size. No better proof of this state of things is forthcoming than the numerous cases we have of brood mares, and of farmers buying, perhaps, half a dozen little two-year-old weeds for a more song; he turns them out in a yard or paddock, feeds them, perhaps, on roots, chaff, and a little corn, and in a year they have grown out of knowledge. It is no earthly use talking of the .good horses of ages past while wo treat our young ones so totally different, ac a horse with age, and uninjured by early training, must be capable of greater things than a horse that has been at work all the year round 'and from its youth. It may be that years ago they began racing earlier, but they left off earlier. Surely it is opposed to common sense to imagine that by taxing the strength of a two-year-old lo its utmost by making it race five furlongs instead of four it will make it a stayer. Does it not stand to reason that the hardei you tax a youngster's power?, the more you injure it, and by the contrary rule the more you save it the stronger it will be? If the stewards would only notice the early trials of two-year-olds, they woidd have plenty of practical illustrations. You see them glory in the fun for half a mile, and hold their own for that distance in rare form, but here their delight ends, the next hundred yards settles them,*and in the final they don't know what lo do with themselves. There is far greater injury done to two-year-olds at the end of'a gallop lha.ii at (Ise beginning, and they would never mind beginning if it were not for the memory of the distressing finish. Horses can stand punishment as often as you like when they are fresh, but few hearts in man or beast are stout enough to stand that most awful feeling of utter exhaustion, and punishment with it, many times.