14 MARCH 1952, Page 24

The Horse - butcher's Trade For a long time I have admired

the ponies our local carrier trots to a field farther up the road. They are shaggy mountain-ponies, none of them very old and just the sort of animal for a young boy or girl. Without asking, I had assumed that they were bought and sold with that end in view. Yesterday I discovered that the ponies are a quick turn-over in the trade of horse-meat to feed the towns. The profit on them works out at about a pound a head for the dealer. What the horse-butcher gets I don't know. The meat is expensive, I am told. It should be, for it is being eaten at the price of the extinction of a species. When the horse-meat queue has vanished from the street, the little Welsh ponies will be gone from the mountain. They cannot last forever.