TRAINING ALL THE YEAR,

Otago Witness, Issue 2355, 13 April 1899, Page 36

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 nu- \ merou3 compulsory long-distance races, says a writer in Sporting Life, if the training of that thoroughbred in its youth is to keep on all the year round, as haa been the custom of late years. In yearß gone by, when we u=ed to have frost and a month or six weeks' skat- , ing in its proper season, when Christmas was Christmas and Winter was Winter, Nature itself played the great and important part which^oommon sense in the human being haß 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 i in a fow stables such as those of Marsh, at Egerton -House, and -John Porter, at Kingsc^ere, this is not now seen. Training goes on all the year, because Nature of late years haa 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 he was as a two3 r ear-old in the preceding autumn, and three-year-olds hardly reach four-year-olds at all. Our cup horses are gone, and the classic races fall to horses that are rested through the winter, and to stables that rest them and give them time to mature. We see foal 6 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 organ? 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 oases we have of brnod mares, and of farmers buying, perhaps, half a dozen little . two-year-old weeds for a mere song ; he turns i them out in a yard or paddock, leads them, perhaps, on roots, ohaff, and a little corn, and in a year they ha-ve grown out of knowledce. It is no earthly upe talking of the good horses of ages past -while we treat our young ones ho totally different, as a horse with ago, and uninjured by early training, must be capable of greater "things than a horse j that has been at work all the year round ! and from itf youth. It may be that years ago they began racing earlier, but they left j off earlier. Surely it is opposed to common j sense to imagine that by taxing the strength of a two-year-old to its utmost by making it race five furlongs instead, of four it will make it a stayer. Does it not stand to leason that the harder you tax a youngster's powers > 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 TBarly trials of two-year-olds, they would have plenty of practical illustrations. You see them glory in the fun for half a mile, and "hold *heir own for that distance in Tare form, '

but here -their delight ends, the next hundred yards settles them, and in the final they don't know what to do with themselves. There is far greater injury done to two-year-olds at the end of a gallop than at the 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.