The St. Johns herald., 1893-04-13
WHERE HORSES ARE CHEAP.
Queenslsnd Farmers Pay for Having Them
 Killed.

Queensland Farmers Pay for Having Them
 Killed.
 No one can buy horse in this city, says the Washington Star, which is fit for any purpose, for less than one hun dred dollars. A broken-down car horse is worth nearly this amount. A horse for grocer's cart in New York, Chi cago. or San Francisco will cost from one hundred and fifty t. two hundred dollars. In Queensland, Australia. how ever, the horse market is away down. A sound, well broken animal can be bought for five dollars. Farmers in the interior cannot afford to send horses to Brisbane for sale, because ordinary stock will not bring more than one dol lar and seventy-five cents head. They shoot them instead! And, what is still more startling, they pay at the rate of sixty-two cents a head for having them shoti
 All of these statements are strictly correct. The colony of Queensland is now seriously discussing the advisabili ty of passing law imposing tax on all stallions and authorizing the ap- pointment of inspectors to see that all unlicensed animals are killed. All over Queensland they are going to keep down horses as we keep down the superabundance of dogs in the city of Washington.
 Horse-breeding in Australia was for many years a remunerative business. A great demand was created by the taking up and occupying of new coun- try, from the opening up of the new gold fields and for the prosecution of the sugar industry.
 Everyone who had land began breed ing horses. Now the demand has ceased, the sugar industry is declining, the mining is stationary and the owners of what was formerly new country are sellers instead of buyers. The conse- quence is that the whole country is overrun with unstable horses. They cannot be eaten like sheep and cattle, and a boiling-down factory for the manufacture of glue and other products failed after consuming fifty thousand animals.
 Now, in a semiwild state, they over run the entire interior of the colony. The best of them bring at auction not more than thirteen dollars or fourteen dollars a dozen. Property holders in New South Wales have relieved them selves of the burden on their grazing lands by shooting them. On the Bar won river, within two years, between sixty thousand and seventy thousand head were destroyed, at cost to their nominal owners of twenty-five shillings six pence a head. Queensland has now the same trouble to fight. A law en- titled "The Marsupials Destruction Act" is now in force, directed against the kangaroos, to check the increase of these noxlous animals. But kangaroo's skin is worth three dollars and seventy five cents in the open market at Bris- bane.
 How much more need is there, then, for a destruction act when horses are larger animals, eat more, are more numerous than kangaroos and are nearly worthlesSl This is the question which is agitating the property holders of Queensland at the present time, as is learned from the recent bulletins of the department of agriculture of that colony: Will it pay Australians to ship these horses to the United States? The passage to San Francisco will take twenty days. The Pacific ocean at certain times is almost smooth. One of the Australian steamships will probably carry from seven hundred to one thou sand horses at trip. The import duty on horses and mules at present is thirty dollars head. It resolves itself into question of water carriage.