Livestock farming

Agriculture, as is well known, has in livestock farming one of its most valuable aids, especially in cattle, which supply the raw material for making cheese and butter. Since all the cattle in Madeira are kept in stalls, it is chiefly they that provide the farmer with the manure indispensable for fertilising the land given over to the various crops.

What we might say here about livestock farming has already been set out at some length in the article Livestock, on pp. 70–75 of this volume of the Elucidário, to which we refer the reader. Nevertheless, we do not wish to omit recording here an interesting particularity of the horses and other equines of the Madeiran region, as a clarification of, or supplement to, what was said in the article devoted to Livestock. This information is taken from an article published in the former Diário Popular (‘The People’s Daily’) of 2 July 1902, which may be read with considerable profit on this subject.

“

Livestock needed to feed the settlers and to work alongside them was taken from Portugal to Madeira. However, as the clearing of the land gradually reduced the pastures, the size of the animals also gradually diminished for lack of food.

Today the descendants of the horses that first populated the island form a variety marked by its small stature: on average Madeiran horses stand 1.22 m high, never exceeding a maximum of 1.30 m.

This is how the variety was described by Mr João Tierno, formerly livestock intendant (intendente de pecuária) of Madeira.

“

In general the horses of this variety have a long, slender, lean head; the face straight, or sometimes slightly arched; short ears; prominent orbital arches; a neck of moderate thickness with a fair mane; flat sides; a saddle back; a sloping croup; a large, thick tail; a small, drawn-in belly; and straight limbs with slender bones. They are hardy and frugal, with that enforced frugality imposed by meagre grazing; and the functional exercise to which grazing on steep mountains has accustomed them has given them well-set limbs and hard hooves. These qualities, together with the natural spirit of their mountain temperament, make them fit for work on the island’s rough paths.

This shows that the Madeira pony is the Portuguese horse with a convex profile, the Betic-Lusitanian type, which, despite the smallness to which its scanty diet has reduced it, still retains the elegance of its original forms.

Horses in Madeira are kept on pasture. Even mares far advanced in pregnancy are kept this way, grazing in the mountains, where the foals are born and follow their mothers, with no shelter to protect them from the vagaries of the weather.

Under such conditions it is easy to understand how the Betic-Lusitanian breed, brought to the island, gradually lost its original morphology over five centuries, until it became what is now the Madeiran variety.

Madeira’s horse population has no economic importance. The few good horses seen on the island were brought from the mainland and are used for riding or to draw the very small number of wheeled carriages in the city of Funchal, where urban transport is preferably by luxurious sledges drawn by oxen.

More than once Madeirans have attempted the venture of crossbreeding, with the aim of increasing the size of their ponies; the regime imposed on the animals by the island’s agricultural situation has always frustrated these attempts.’