REGISTRATION OF STALLIONS BILL. [H.L.] (Hansard, 2 December 1912)

LORD SALTOUN
My Lords, I will be as brief as I can in asking your Lordships to read this Bill a second time. You will remember that the late Minister for Agriculture, the noble Marquess opposite (Lord Lincolnshire), did a considerable amount of good work in connection with the breeding of horses. Amongst other things he instituted the Advisory Council, and from that the county committees were instituted. King's premium stallions were 41 sent to various centres and a great point was made of the registration of stallions. Considerable encouragement was given to owners of stallions all through the country to have them registered, and up to May 3 of this year there were 261 light stallions registered, of which 170 were thoroughbred horses. There were 109 ponies, besides hackneys and others, a considerable number of shire horses, and in comparison a very few Clydesdales. The matter has been taken up by owners of stallions, and they have registered with the Board of Agriculture a considerable number of horses, and the register is increasing rapidly. Of course, the most important thing in breeding is that the stallion should be sound, because a stallion serves from sixty to sixty-five mares every year, and the result is that if the horse is unsound a very large percentage of unsound produce is left behind, whereas if a foal is bred from an unsound mare she can only leave one unsound foal behind her. That is an important: thing to remember.
I will read a few lines from the Regulations for the Registration of Stallions, which are very important— The object which the Board have in view in promoting the registration of stallions is the elimination of the unsound sire. The decline in the light horse breeding industry and the deterioration of the quality of many of the horses bred are in great measure due to the use of stallions which are affected by hereditary disease and unsuitable for breeding purposes. That is the object of the Board of Agriculture in getting stallions registered, and it shows how important they consider the soundness of the sires. When the county committees were instituted I was appointed chairman of the committee of the county in which I reside. We had a premium horse down last year, and he was fairly successful. The committee took an enormous amount of trouble in finding suitable mares from which to breed, and, on the whole, the result was very creditable and satisfactory. But this year it came to be known that the premium horse was going about, and the result was that we have had a great number of very doubtful horses going about in front of the premium horse and going actually to the doors of tenants and small farmers, who very naturally, instead of having to send a mare four or five or six miles to the premium stallion, take advantage of the animal which is brought to them for a very small fee.
42 I would like to trouble your Lordships, because I feel very strongly on the point, with a letter I received some little time ago, which seems to me to put the case very much in a nut-shell. My correspondent writes— It seems to me that since a King's premium horse has been up here and stirred up a bit of enthusiasm in the light horse breeding line the owners of unsound crocks of all types of light stallions (hackneys, Clevelands, Yorkshire coach horses, and all sorts of nondescripts) have taken advantage of it, and the country is swarming with these poachers who creep or hobble about from farm to farm and catch on mares at fees of 12s. 6d. upwards. They would not have had any encouragement from the farmers before, but now the light horse breeding is being pushed and talked about they are reaping the advantage of it by coming in at a cheaper rate than the premium horse. That is absolutely the fact. I believe there are as many as fourteen horses travelling about in my own county, and I know also that this is the experience in a number of other counties. Your Lordships know the great difficulty there was in supplying horses to the Army during the South African War. Yet in those clays you had all the omnibus horses and any quantity of different kinds of horses to draw upon, but since those days the advent of motors and different kinds of mechanically-propelled vehicles has cut all that out, and in the time to conic it will be found much more difficult to find horses for the Army. The Board of Agriculture have the right to stamp out all kinds of diseases in cattle, sheep, and pigs, and sometimes they order the slaughter of a whole herd of cattle because of a contagious disease. I cannot for the life of me see why they could not also have the power of saying that unsoundness should be eliminated from horses that are sent round as stallions. I think it right to pay a tribute to the Advisory Board. I quite recognise that they have done a great deal of work. I know that at the present moment they are inquiring into this subject, because I myself caused it, I think, to be brought before them, but if nothing is done just now to prevent inferior horses travelling it will be almost impossible to catch up the time that is lost. It is impossible for the Advisory Board to report before another year. Then it will take at least a year to draft a Bill and get it introduced, and probably two years before it becomes law. So that three or four years would be absolutely lost, and by the time such a Bill is passed the very horses that are being bred now and are foals this 43 year will be those that you require to breed from, and if you allow this absolutely unlimited competitorship to go on amongst the stallions used all over the country you will have thousands and thousands of unsound produce which will be the only things eventually from which yon can breed.
That is all I have to say at this late hour in regard to the Bill. The Bill is not a very stringent one, but I feel that something must be clone, and therefore I have ventured to bring this Bill before your Lordships. Clause 1 says that every stallion which travels for a service fee shall be registered in accordance with regulations made by the Board of Agriculture. Any horse, whether he is sound or not, may stand, and if anybody wishes to send his mare to an unsound horse he is, of course, at liberty to do it. The second part of that clause says that in respect of every stallion so registered a certificate of registration shall be issued by the Board. I understand that the conditions as to soundness have not been absolutely settled by the Board, but there are conditions which have been already laid down which, to my mind, are very fair, and if those are adhered to I do not think there would be very much to fear; but, at all events, the Board have the right to alter any regulations that may be made from time to time whenever they choose. The second clause gives the Board power to make regulations. The other clauses deal with offences and penalties. I beg to move the Second Reading of this Bill.

LORD LUCAS
My Lords, I should like to say at once, on behalf of the Board of Agriculture, that we welcome the Bill of the noble Lord. When I say we welcome it, we are in absolute agreement with him as to the principle that is contained in it. But when we come to the details of the Bill I am afraid we shall find a great many points to differ on. As to our own position in the matter, I am afraid we do not agree with the noble Lord that the need for hurrying is quite so great as he made out. After all, the present system of horse-breeding has gone on for a great number of years, and in spite of there being a great many unsound stallions in the country the fact remains that we have the best horseflesh in the world. You have to move with a certain amount of circumspection 44 before you upset a system that has gone on for a considerable time. I do not want it to be thought that I am for a moment taking up a brief on behalf of the unsound stallion, because I am not. Very much the opposite. We have ourselves moved in the matter, not by way of legislation, but rather from the point of view of getting public opinion focussed on this question by the issue of the Board of Agriculture's certificates. They have, I am glad to say, been fairly well taken up. This year we issued 715 of them, and this is only the second year of their existence; and from the information one gets I think that owners of mares, who of course are the people chiefly interested in the thing, are getting more and more into the habit of asking to see the Board's certificate before they send their mare to a horse. That is all in the right direction.
I do not think, either, that this is a matter in which we want, if we can help it, to move absolutely single banded. After all, there are the big breed societies, very important bodies, and as regards their shows and things of that kind they exact a careful and searching veterinary examination, and a certificate is required. I think it is not an unrealisable ideal that we, the Board, and all the breed societies and the other bodies interested in this matter should agree to accept some common formula of soundness—that is one of the first things we ought to do—and that we should then co-operate on some lines and all work together for the elimination of the unsound stallion. Personally I regard that as an indispensable preliminary before we set to work and take what you might call violent measures against the unsound stallion. I am afraid the question is not quite such a simple one as perhaps the noble Lord thinks it is. It is fraught with a large number of difficulties, and I may say his Bill falls short on a considerable number of points.
I would also like to say at once that there are a number of points in the Bill with regard to which we ourselves are not prepared with a solution. The moment one begins to go into this question one finds that it will be a very difficult and rather delicate task to undertake. I would like to call your Lordships' attention to one or two points on which it seems to me that the Bill falls short. First of all, the Bill legislates against the travelling stallion only, and does not deal in any form with 45 the stallion that stands at stud at any particular place. Of course, that saves the noble Lord from having to deal with some of the difficulties that have been raised by breeders in that connection. Then there is another horse which you might almost call of the intermediate class. Fie does not travel; he stands for service at a particular place but is paraded a good deal for exhibition at markets and various places, and he is advertised as standing for service at such and such a farm, usually a place easy to get at, and a great many mares are sent to that horse. If you pass the Bill as it stands no doubt a good many of the horses that the noble Lord has referred to in his speech and rightly complained of would become that type of what you might call intermediate horse, and I do not know that you would have done much good. No doubt they would procure fewer mares, but that they would obtain mares is undoubted. Then there is a remarkable omission in the noble Lord's Bill. He omits all heavy horses and ponies.

LORD SALTOUN
I intended ponies to be included in "horses."

LORD LUCAS
Horses are horses and ponies are ponies as a rule, and it would require an amendment of the Bill to make the matter clear. But that is only a small point. I do not know why the noble Lord leaves out heavy horses. As we know, the percentage of unsoundness in heavy horses is probably higher than that in any other breed, and I do not think we could ever regard any Bill as satisfactory which did not include heavy horses. Then there is the question of when the Bill should take effect. The noble Lord suggests 1913. I think it would be very hard on a number of these stallion owners to make it impossible for them to use their horses after the end of this year. Apart from the merits of the question one has to remember that a number of these horses, unsound as they are, are very valuable animals still, and that their present owners regarded them as an investment when they purchased them, and you would certainly have to give a considerable amount of notice in order to allow these men to replace the stallions they had bought.
Then as to one or two smaller points. First of all there is the question of suitability. It is quite true that in the certificate that we issue we require suitability —that the horse should be considered from the point of view of suitability before he 46 gets a certificate. I rather think that as a result of our experience we should not advise that to be continued. It is a very arbitrary thing to ask a veterinary surgeon, even where there is an appeal from his decision, which we provide for, to decide whether a horse is suitable, because you have to take both the horse and the mare into consideration when deciding the question of suitability. Then there is the question of the stud book. I think the noble Lord would meet with great opposition from all the people who run stud books, with the possible exception of the Hunters' improvement Society. It is not really a register of stock but a register of pedigree, and the opinion is that the two things should not be mixed up. There is also a good deal in the drafting of the Bill which would have to be overhauled. I will not detain your Lordships by going into that.
As I say, we are very glad to see the Bill and we welcome it, and I may be allowed to congratulate the noble Lord on bringing it in, because I think it is a very good thing that a move should be made in this direction. But I hope the noble Lord will be content with the Second Reading now, and not press the Bill further, because it has very little chance of passing into law this session and I dare say the noble Lord does not anticipate that it will do so. Then if I might make a suggestion to him it would be this, that between now and next session he should redraft his Bill covering some of the points I have mentioned and bring it up again. If we could be of any assistance to him we should be most happy to do everything we could to help in the redrafting of the Bill, but even then when it came up again there would still be a number of these difficult points that would want to be settled. I think the best way, probably, in which to deal with the matter would be for the Bill after it is redrafted to be referred to a Select Committee of this House. I can think of no body better qualified than a Select Committee of your Lordships' Rouse to deal with a question of this kind and with the number of very difficult points that arise. If I may make that suggestion to the noble Lord I believe that would be the best way of arriving at what we all want, which is a suitable Bill for dealing with the elimination of unsound stallions.