THE OUTLOOK FOR HUNTERS’ RACES.

New Zealand Illustrated Sporting & Dramatic Review, Issue 1418, 28 June 1917, Page 7

THE OUTLOOK FOR HUNTERS’ RACES.

It would appear at the first blush that the hunt clubs throughout New Zealand are going to suffer most through the curtailment of racing, as so many are not to have race meetings in the coming season, and it may be in more seasons than one, but this may not actually be the case, and we trust that the other clubs will help them with subsidies as in the past, when they needed help, and that not only will they do this, but provide races for the hunter classes in districts where hounds are kept, if possible. To breed horses of the hunter and steeplechasing type is really as much to be encouraged as the breeding of the thoroughbred, which, despite all the best endeavours of their possessors to get horses of substance as well as quality, too often come small and with a lack of the size anticipated. The thoroughbred with substance and size, or the three-quarter-breds showing more of the quality of their clean-bred sires, is what are wanted for the hunting field and for hunt club racing, and it pays hunting folk to get hold of horses of that type and make and develop them. The hunters’ races, and the knowledge that there are to be such events in more districts than one, is an incentive to many to breed or to buy likely sorts bred by others for the double purpose of getting enjoyment out of them in the field and a race, or races, later on, or a price, if they desire to sell, that will compensate them for the care and time taken in the making of their horses. As racegoers know, the hunting field has been the schooling place of many a successful hunter which has furnished and developed into something good enough to compete with credit in the best cross-country events in the land. It is partly on that account that we desire to see obstacles removed from the path of those who are ever ready to incur the initial expense of breeding or buying and making horses serviceable for hunting as well as steeplechasing. A list of all the good horses that were first educated in the hunting fields of New Zealand would form a long and interesting and most instructive one. Hunting is still being carried on in the Dominion, but fewer young men take part, and in some districts ladies, actual participants, are in greater numbers than ever previously and quite a number have qualified horses in the Auckland and Waikato district, we understand, for events which it is now feared are not to eventuate. If the clubs holding spring meetings could be persuaded to put races on for hunters a good many would be kept going which may be sold to go elsewhere or be turned out as soon as the meets end.