Studies Concerning the Amelioration Action of the Horses in the Maramures Region

Abstract

The researches took place on 54 horses belonging to households from 12 villages in Maramures, situated in mountain, hill or plain regi ons. I have tried to come up with a horse type preferred by Maramures countrymen, by taking body measurements of the 54 horses and by taking into consideration the effects and results of the e mpirical and controlled actions of improvement. The preferred horse proved to be medium tall and heavy. I have found horses of important robustness - up to 125.27 as well as of great massiveness - up to 1 37.15. 60.52% of the improved studied horses have a rectangular body, specific to heavy traction hors es. MATERIAL AND METHOD Biological teaching aids on which I have conducted the researches consisted in horses from the 54 individual farms and housekeepings. Other teaching aids used were archive documents, hi story works from Maramures, as well as monographs of the villages. For the measurements I used zoometer, metric tape, meter and a digital camera . As a work method I have chosen: studying the archive documents and other works to find information concerning the past movement of horses (wars, trade, transports, selling); asking people in the field; measuring and monitoring the d imensions of corporal parameters of the three categories of horses; measurement of the foll owing corporal characteristic values: index of lateral corporal format which can be seen from p rofile; index of massiveness; index of robustness and compactness; system of bones index; processing of statistics in view of results. RESULTS AND DISCUSSIONS An important number of studied documents show that different types of horses were brought to Maramures along the years. Some of them got here as war captures while other were brought by means of markets, inter-breeding with local horses. The first organized actions of improvement are mentioned in a document from 1777, when they tried to correct and even replace the horses that were not thoroughb red thus trying to obtain better horses of noble race (1). During the XIX and XX century, in t he plain areas of the region, the Hungarian counts raised thoroughbred horses, like t he American Trotter Half Blood, Nonius, or the Half English Blood. This lead to an improvem ent of the existing horse breeds because no one bought horses from a common breeder, not even the army (2). Between the wars, in 1924, the County Zootechnical Committee bought six Lipitan and Hutul male horses from Bucovina in order to improve the horses in the anci ent part of Maramures where the most primitive horse was raised, the sherder mountain ho rse (3). The Maramures countrymen bought or exchanged horses with the people from Dej,