fillies, colts and green grass

Korero (AEWS), Volume 2, Issue 24, 29 January 1945, Page 23

fillies, colts and green grass

4 Torero mm % A

Filly foals, colt foals, and green grass. Famous mares and good mares—chestnuts, bays, browns, greys, and blacks. A yearling colt with its tail chewed off by a calf. Hens fussing, and a dog with a litter of pups. A stable window high from the ground shattered that morning by a highstepping young lady, a yearling filly. Two stallions with pedigrees as long, as impressive, as their racing records. A rush of cat, a squeak of starling. Shady trees, an old country house. A road alongside with hardly a car day or night—which is just as well with all the dust : a road alongside with more hoof marks than signs of tyres, with grass tracks on the edge which couldn’t be better for cantering. Two cows ; proper and prim as they are. in all that mixed company they like their noses rubbed with the rest of them. Stables and stalls and harness rooms ; outbuildings with the rafters bulging with hay and oats and chaff. Youngsters and babies with tender noses sunburnt and white faces freckled. Everywhere are horses and wide acres. On the gate is the name —Rosswood Stud. Here are sired and dammed foals that will bring up to four-figure bids at yearling sales. They will be among the champions of the coming years. Some, like their mothers and fathers before them, will make racecourse history. Some will be hunters, hurdlers, and steeplechasers; some, perhaps, polo ponies, and others hacks. But there is one thing for sure : they will always be thoroughbreds.

With a stud it doesn’t matter how long or how green grows the grass, how fine the mares, or how careful the attention if the sires are not of similar high standard. At Rosswood Stud are two sires, Beaulivre and Beau Vite, which are two of the greatest horses ever to have raced in New Zealand. Both are by the Son-in-Law sire, Beau Pere, whose stock created a sensation in the sale ring before any of them had ever raced, and made another sensation when they first began to race. From the start of his career at the stud Beau Pere was a success. From five seasons he has sired the winners of more than in stakes ; for at least two years he has headed the list of winning sires. Here are some facts and figures about the two leading offspring of the famous Beau Pere. Beau Vite heads the progeny; during his racing career he started sixty times for thirty-one wins, nine seconds, and five thirds, and earned nearly in stakes. He won over all distances from five furlongs to two miles and a quarter. As a stayer he had few equals, while his speed enabled him to beat the best sprinters at their own distances. At different times he beat, weight-for-age or giving away weight, all the champion horses in Australia and New Zealand, including Beaulivre, High Caste, Ajax, Reading, Tranquil Star, Royal Chief, Gold Salute, Old Bill, Lucrative, Mildura, and Dashing Cavalier. Beaulivre, foaled in the same season as Beau Vite, was never out of the money in his first thirty-one races. As a two-year

old he was sold for 200 guineas.. In fortynine races he won twenty-one firsts, eight seconds, and eight thirds ; his stake money amounted to nearly £20,000. Each of the pair earned high racing honours in Australia as well as in New Zealand. We sat under the walnut tree and listened to stories of the Beaux Vite and Livre. Their pedigrees, on both sides, go back for, it seems, centuries of years and through hundreds of sprinters and stayers, recordbreakers and champions : it’s not hard to imagine William the Conqueror, Ben Hur, and Richard the Lionheart bouncing the bidding along for these ancestors at the yearling sales of those days. We heard mentioned such famous names as Son-in-Law (founder of one, if not the best, line of stayers in the world), Dominant, Martian, Passbook, Paper Money, and Musket. We heard of their track records, Australian records, and New Zealand records ; we heard of races run and won with 2 stone given away to the field ; we heard of attempts in the night to kill Beau Vite (in Australia shortly before one Melbourne Cup a horse in the next stall to Beau Vite was shot by mistake for this champion). We heard all the stories. It was time we had a look at these two Beaux. Beau Vite, undisputed champion of Australia and New Zealand at the time of his retirement from the turf, was having an argument with a black cock pheasant. And such a noise they were making:

rearing, stamping, ears-back snorts from Beau Vite ; feathers-ruffled squawking, beak pecking, and wings flapping from the pheasant. The owner of the stud has as one of his hobbies an aviary, the cages of which are beside the stallion’s pen. The pheasant and the stallion don’t like each other at all, and they make no bones about their feelings. It’s just as well from the sound of things there is a 6 ft. fence and wire netting between them. From the days before he was broken and right through his brilliant racing career, Beau Vite has been working with the owner of the stud. When the owner looked over the high wooden fence round the pen, the champion came trotting over ; he knew that voice, he wanted his nose rubbed. Like his half-brother in another pen a chain or two away, Beau Vite is quiet and friendly. But you have to be careful : those nips may be meant as an afternoon greeting, but the teeth are sharp and the jaws strong. We moved back a pace from the fence. Beau Vite and Beaulivre are beautiful horses : models of symmetry and conformation, with magnificent physique. Beau Vite stands at a fee of 75 guineas and Beaulivre at 50 guineas. The work of the horse breeder is measured by the seasons. The first foals are dropped in August ; they continue to come in increasing numbers through September and October, tailing off in November. For racing purposes all horses, regardless of when they were born, have an official birthday on the Ist of August. Breeders try to get them early in the spring—not so early that there will be a chance of having them born in July (it would be disastrous for a horse’s racing career to be counted a yearling before it is weaned), but not so late that they will be small for their age group. Breeding is in the same months as foaling ; if mares are not served about nine or ten days after delivering a foal, there is a period of wasted time before there is another chance. It is usual for a mare to have a foal at foot and to be in foal again for the next season. Normal gestation is 315 days, but with different mares this period varies.

After the foaling and breeding is finished, the main work, apart, of course, from caring for the new babies, is preparing the yearlings for the main sales in January-—highlight of the breeder’s year. It is hard, exacting work : on the day a yearling enters the ring there must not be a hair out of place. After the yearling .sales comes the breeder’s

slack time, with a chance to catch up on property maintenance and other work that has to be neglected through the later, months of the year. For a month or two there’s time to talk, and to argue, too. As one authority says : “ The opinions of horsemen vary on breeding, feeding, breaking, training, riding, shipping, racing, and betting.” The breeder’s job is chancy. He knows no more about the foal he hopes to get than the racing record, the conformation and physique, and the pedigrees of the dam and sire. Those factors may be perfect, but they are no guarantee of what the foal will do later on the racecourse. Not all horses with high-class breeding are race successes, but few reach top flight who have not blood credentials. The foals at this stud are bred to be good. The two sires were undisputed champions ; and among the brood mares are such well-known horses as Cuddle (she must be first), Serenata, Haughty Toti, Fido, Sailor’s Love, Arctic Queen, Anita Foe, Madame Rachel, Sleeveless,

Night Eruption, Doria, Toque, Corinilla, and Wee Bun. Altogether there are fifty mares. One of the results of careful selective breeding over many years is an increase in speed and stamina ; ■ another is that the animals have become more highly strung. Some horses have habits and ideas of living peculiar to themselves :

one won’t eat bran, another won’t look at his meals at the proper time ; this young fellow runs round all day and will never grow fat the way he’s going ; that baby likes to blow bubbles in her drinking water We walked through one of the paddocks of this no-acre property; lush green feed tickled our knees : a mixture of white clover, English and Italian ryes, and Timothy grasses. And it has to be good ; horses are careful, fastidious feeders, and if the grass isn’t the sweetest they would rather grow thin looking over fences than chew a mouthful. Everywhere were mares with foals at foot dozen or more mothers with their November babies. In the middle of the paddock we sat down in the afternoon sunshine to talk. Within two minutes there was a warm snuffling at my neck. It was a curious mother ; and her foal had a snuffle, too. I stroked his nose and tickled his eyelashes : he didn’t move away, his mother took no notice of my attentions. In ten minutes every

horse in the paddock was shuffling and snuffling round us. They pushed our backs, nibbled our arms, and nuzzled our faces and hair. Mothers wandered off in their feeding ; after a while the foals scampered after them —for their feeding ; and most of the time it’s more a game than a meal. Foals are born knowing hunger but not the means of satisfying it : usually it takes about seven minutes to find out. It’s their first discovery in a big exciting world. Soon after birth these babies are wobbling to their delicate feet. Four long legs, and mostly nothing else. Nothing much besides two flickering ears on four stilts. Hobby horses. It takes a year for their bodies to catch upon their legs. Grass, dewy and sweet, is good, but to eat it they have to do more than bend ; they have to kneel. And if a nuisance of a fly is tickling a hind foot it’s such a long way for his head to flick it away. One baby scampers towards us ; stops with a slide and a skid ; and looks at us with round bold eyes, without unconsciously adopting the pose of a champion, with ears pricked, head held high, neck arched, feet square on the ground, tail out from his quarters. He expresses his disapproval of us with hind feet flying, a buck, perhaps his first. Then he starts to run : it’s his latest discovery. Another filly, feeding on uneven ground with her legs in an extraordinary position, suddenly throws up her head and gallops off as though practising to be a fire horse ; flying fast to the nearest fence, then back again for a tug at her mother’s tail, and another chew of grass.

A second later she’s scratching her nose with her off hind foot. Like her friends, she’s never still. Her mother is Cuddle, one of the best handicap mares ever to race in New Zealand. Her father is Beaulivre. If breeding counts, this young miss will be a champion.

Rabbits sit and watch us. They don’t run away : they know they’re safe, that they can’t be shot or trapped while foals are about. But as soon as the fillies and colts are moved there’s never a sign of Brer Rabbit. He knows a thing or two. The foals have baby teeth and baby gives no indication of their permanent colour ; the only way to tell that is by the hair round the eyes and on the nose —with that there is no change. They have long legs, tiny feet, and a short tail. After a few months their lean flanks start to fill, they broaden over the loins and in the quarters. They have learnt to be handled, they don’t mind a headstall, they know what it is to be led. Soon they will make a journey to the yearling sales, probably at Trentham in January. They have to be sold ; for it is only rarely that a horse is bred and trained on the same property.