English blood, infused with judgment, allies well with the Percheron race, and we have met with perfectly successful results in the midst of the disappointments which have been the consequences of injudicious crossing. Too often these crossings have been effected in violation of common sense, without any attention to the distance which separates the blood horse from the common, low-bred Percheron mare, she having no affinity with him. But these trials require science, wealth, and perseverance, and are far from being within the reach of ordinary breeders. Those who would succeed must possess the talent of waiting, for unfortunately the rearing of the resulting progeny is a burden. Their slow development renders them but little fit for the labors to which the farmer is in the habit of consigning his colts. Then, they cannot, like the young Percheron, pass from hand to hand, and thus they find themselves stripped of the only advantage which renders the raising of the draft colts so profitable: avoiding embarrassment and affording a prompt profit to all through whose hands they pass. In fact, it can easily be conceived how favorably, at present, are these chances of profit distributed among several hands. The capital invested is soon returned; and thus this operation is within the reach of all purses.
PRINCE IMPERIAL.—FRENCH NORMAN.
The issue of English blood, if judiciously managed, will some day be finer than the unimproved Percheron. But, although carefully looked after and abundantly fed, he will remain puny during his early growth, and therefore his account can only be closed at a distant date. By whom, then, is he to be raised? By the farmer rich in ready money? In every country such men are rare. By the large landed proprietor? But he is not a breeder, or if he be, it is only of race-horses.
Some half-blood English stallions noted for strength and weight, standing at Mesle-sur-Sarthe, Courtomer, and Nogent-le-Rotrou, have produced fine coach and draft-horses, but their number has always been rather limited, and they have nearly all been raised without care, like the half-blood colt simply at pasture; consequently, the profit accruing has been nothing, or nearly nothing, and these have been able to add nothing useful in the way of example and imitation.
On the contrary, in Lower Perche, commencing at Nogent and extending as far as Vendôme, the draft-horse, properly speaking, is the only one that has been raised. The wagon-horse is there only met with as an exception, and the cultivator is far from being the worse off on this account. Witness the prosperity of Montdoubleau, which has become the first market of Europe; witness the splendid and spirited trotting mares it produces every year, and of which the Julies of M. Derré and the Sarahs of M. Lamoureux are glorious specimens.
Perche has seen but twice, to our knowledge, good and irrefutable results obtained from the English crossing with her race—the first, with Sandy; the second, with Bayard. Sandy was a draft stallion, with a long and silky mane, a perfectly white coat, and with a high and graceful gait like that of an oriental horse; lean and strong legs, a short head, dilated nostrils, and a large and intelligent eye. Although foaled in England, this horse was evidently not English; he must have come of eastern blood, as this is so often seen among our neighbors who successfully use the Arab blood in the formation of their draft and hunting races.
As for Bayard, he was a son of a Percheron mare belonging to M. Viel, of Chiffreville, near Argenton, one of the finest and purest ever seen. This mare had been bred to Idalis, a small and well-knit wagon-horse, son of Don Quichotte, who descended from the thoroughbred brood-mare Moina. Consequently, Bayard had in his veins some of the best oriental blood, and it is to this circumstance that is attributed the vigor, gait, and beauty, of all his progeny.
Perhaps the two stallions Benvenuto and Fandango, which passed for Anglo-Percherons, and which have been cited as types of draft-horse stallions, will be held up to me as a refutation. Benvenuto, the stallion from Pin, which has produced well in Perche, was not the son of Eastham and a Percheron mare, as was said at the time in order to have him accepted by the government, but was really out of a Percheron mare by a Percheron stallion coming from the neighborhood of Bellesme, and the descendant of Arabian stallions which had been standing in that district.
Fandango, the other crossed Percheron, uniformly a successful stallion, had double cross, on the sire’s side, of the blood of the Arabian Dagout, and his dam, whose pedigree has also been explained to me, came likewise from near Bellesme.
A Percheron stallion called Jean-le-Blanc, native of Mauves, and sold about the year 1825 to a M. Viard of Villers, in Ouche, near Sap, (department of the Orne,) has been the sole improving agent of the equine race in Ouche, which, up to that time, was reduced to miserable small horses without any stamp or value. Although heavy, powerful, and, indeed, a shaft-horse, his gait and an indescribable something pervading his whole body, recalled so thoroughly the idea of the oriental family that one was disposed to take him for an enlarged Arabian. This fact, often related to us, excited our curiosity. We did not rest until pressing inquiry upon inquiry, one after another, we ascertained that his family had been crossed with a stallion from the Pin stables, standing at the Chateau of Côèsmes, near Bellesme. And, what was this stallion? The Arab Gallipoli!
What can be inferred from these facts, if it be not that the crossings which have best succeeded in Perche have been those of the Arab, and that the English crosses have only succeeded when tempered by contact with the Arab?
But if the absolute want of stallions for improving the breed be felt among the pure Percherons; if it be impossible to procure either good Arabs or heavy English, freshly tempered with Arab blood; if important and powerful considerations compel a recourse to the English cross, the latter should only be accepted intelligently and under good and wise conditions. Therefore we ask leave to refer the reader particularly to what we have already advanced in the preceding chapter upon the choice of an English stallion.
In Brittany, in the department of Finisterre, we have often heard it declared by quite a large number of breeders, that for having wished to proceed too fast in that way, they had, from the commencement, experienced numberless disappointments, the second generation from the English cross being always inferior to the first. From stout sires and dams, who, from their general appearance might be classed in the category of heavy-draft, there daily came ungainly stock, thin, lanky, leggy, and without weight in the hind-quarter, unattractive, of a difficult sale when young, and proving a veritable misfortune to the small farmer counting upon the sale of the colt to pay his rent and having neither the place nor means to raise him. This stock was, moreover, the object of another disappointment quite as serious as the first; rarely was a good worker to be found among this burdensome race.
Is not this tall, lank, weak,—in a word this abortive progeny,—issue of strong and hardy parents, a strange and discouraging result? “Oh! why is this?” exclaimed the Brittany cultivators. There was a simple reason for it, of which they had not learned the value. They proceeded with race-horse speed in the way of crossing, and gave no oats. They were ignorant of the requirements of the distingué horse; they did not know that in the sire and dam, or at least in one of them, there was circulating more or less English blood, which produces strange results in proportion as it leaves its native place and reaches a poor country or one of hard work, and in which it no longer receives the prodigal care of its native land.
We have said that the Arab preserves indefinitely his warm blood and constantly gives what he has not even himself,—although this truth resembles a paradox,—that is: a powerful appearance and a strong frame. It is not the same with the English horse and his derivatives; they become thin and always degenerate. If their progeny be not fed with oats without stint,—they require this, and are heavy eaters, like everything which comes from the north,—their blood grows poorer rapidly. In successive generations of these families, born in a dull and damp atmosphere scarcely ever visited by the sun, the legs become lean and lanky. It is necessary to recur incessantly to new drafts of English upon English, always expensive and requiring additional care, without taking into account that the result of too great an infusion of this peevish and often irascible blood would be to destroy the heavy-draft race—a race that I would like to see preserved intact alongside of the two others, though he be not quite suited to a country as hilly as Perche. He might, doubtless, plow successfully the vast and smooth plains of Beauce; but this is not the lot of all. I look for him in that busy country called Perche, where he must, without rest or pity, with a shoulder free from all tenderness, drag heavy vehicles to the tops of hills, and it will please me to see the play of his haunches and limbs in descending with these loads bravely and without flinching to the bottom of the valleys.
Do you expect, also, from a horse derived from English blood that cool, restrained, and ever fresh energy, that courageous patience of which the Percheron, every day, gives an example in the omnibuses of the streets of Paris? Dragging at a trot heavy loads, the weight of which frightens the imagination; stopping short, both in ascending or descending; starting off freely and always without balking; never sulking at his work or food, and fearing neither heat nor cold: this is a specimen of Percheron qualities.
Do you expect from an unjudicious cross with English blood a good, heavy draft-horse, a good shaft-horse, or a true wagon-horse? No one has now any illusion on this score.
In London, a traction of only about 2,000 lbs. is required of a draft-horse. In Paris, the horses harnessed to the heavy stone carts are required to drag as much as 5,000 lbs. each, and often even more.
What will dealers in heavy draft-horses do? The trade is already taxed to supply the demand. For long experience has taught, and unjudicious crosses have proved the English horse and his derivatives to be unfit for this purpose, for they are too nervous and not sufficiently staunch. Thus, the trade avoids them by instinct, and by instinct avoids every thing resembling them. And, on the other hand, it seizes hold of and clings eagerly to every indication that can serve it as a sign or mark—every thing that can guide it in the search for what it likes, and every thing that can guard against its opposite.
Hence, it repels and proscribes the dark-colored coats without examination and reflection, because they are considered the colors of the English horse; it accepts the grays with confidence, because with them it perceives the absence of the dreaded blood, and in them it has found that which satisfies all its wants. Would we have arrived at this point if we had been prudent, and had the cross-breeding been better understood?
Finally, what is there at the end of this negative pole and this positive pole? There is the Percheron on whom has devolved, and will devolve for a long time yet, the rude and killing mission of executing the feats of strength exacted of him by modern civilization. The profits in supplying the demand, accrue, and will accrue for a long time to the producer.
Thus so long as machinery does not replace the horse in the traction of heavy carriages, so long as the necessity for hard labor remains, requiring strength, intelligence, endurance, and willingness, so long to the Percheron alone will be reserved the dangerous honor of being the great draft power, and the price of this matchless agent will increase in proportion to the growing impossibility of finding his substitute.
It is now the time, while crossing the active and trotting breeds with the Arab or with the well-chosen English horse, to carefully preserve the heavy draft-horse, and, by means of persevering and judicious crossing, retain for him his marked superiority.
These crossings, which I will sum up in concluding, may find a powerful aid in the creation of a Stud-book of the Percheron breed.