The Intimate Bond

by Brian Fagan

  Mounted soldiers, often of great ability, participated in many great moments in history, but the same events, and many lesser violent conflicts, exposed horses to all the horror and suffering of warfare at its most violent. We should never forget that millions of them suffered, were wounded grievously, or were killed or starved to death in service to their masters, a role thrust on them whether they desired it or not. The artillery officer Cavalié Mercer spent several days on the Waterloo battlefield and was appalled by the suffering of wounded and dying horses. Some struggled, still living, with their entrails exposed, trying vainly to stand. Others lay quietly, lifting their heads, gazing wistfully until they convulsed in death. One beast had lost both its hind legs; Mercer saw it looking about and “sending forth, from time to time, long and protracted melancholy neighing.” He couldn’t bring himself to put it out of its misery after so much bloodshed. His epitaph for the grievously wounded mounts echoes over two centuries in three words that say it all: “Mild, patient, enduring,”18

  CHAPTER 17

  Cruelty to the Indispensable

  Grim, mercenary callousness—such behavior toward farm animals and the beasts that powered a rapidly industrializing world was commonplace long before James Watt developed the steam engine and the cotton gin revolutionized the cotton industry. One only had to visit the Smithfield Market, once outside the city walls but now nestled inside London, to experience the savagery addressed at farm beasts destined for the stockyard. Most people avoided the place, but witnessed cruelty to working animals almost daily.

  “The ground was covered, nearly ankle-deep, with filth and mire; and a thick steam, perpetually rising from the reeking bodies of the cattle, and mingling with the fog, which seemed to rest upon the chimney-tops, hung heavily above. All the pens . . . were filled with sheep; tied up to posts by the gutter side were long lines of beasts and oxen, two or three deep.”1 Novelist Charles Dickens gives a graphic description of London’s Smithfield meat market in Oliver Twist in 1838, with its jostling, disorderly, and drunken crowds of butchers, drovers, thieves, and destitute vagabonds. The suffering the Smithfield beasts endured beggars description, a purgatory their predecessors had endured since medieval times. Not that anyone seemed to care, there being virtually universal apathy toward the hell for animals that was Smithfield. It took a well-publicized cholera scare in 1855 and concern over tainted meat and offal to close the live-animal meat market and move it farther from the city.

  The British had a reputation throughout Europe for harsh cruelty toward animals and an indifference toward animal suffering, this in a country where Christian eloquence about morality and religion was in full flow. Biblical doctrines that placed humans at the pinnacle of living things provided a convenient rationale. But ambivalence about animals haunted religious teachings. How did one account for the affection between humans and their pets? Pampered animals thrived in medieval religious houses, much to the dismay of the authorities. Franciscan policy, laid down at the General Chapter of Narbonne in 1260, stated that “No animal be kept, for any brother or any convent . . . except cats or certain birds for the removal of unclean things.”2

  Nevertheless, as we’ve seen, pet keeping became commonplace among the elite, as religious superstitions faded. Affection toward cherished animals became more commonplace during the seventeenth century. John Locke, the founder of modern educational theory, emphasized the importance of teaching children “to be tender to all sensible creatures.”3 An early children’s book Goody Two-Shoes, published in 1765, featured a heroine, Margaret Meanwell, who cared for mistreated animals. Anthropomorphic and affectionate animals have been heroes and heroines in books for the very young ever since. It’s no coincidence that teaching pet care and responsibility in school is a foundation both of animal welfare movements and of the ethical, kind treatment of animals today. By the time Goody Two-Shoes appeared, there was at least some emerging awareness of animal rights, as from the philosopher Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832), one of the founding thinkers on animal rights. He loved “everything which has four legs,” including both cats and mice.4 Bentham’s thinking, and that of others, led to the first efforts to mitigate cruelty to animals.

  Protecting Animals

  Bentham and others might have loved their cherished beasts, but early-nineteenth-century working animals in Britain, elsewhere in Europe, and in North America, suffered from all manner of cruelty, including being worked to exhaustion and subjected to the fierce indignities of popular sports such as bull baiting and dog fighting, and to elite passions such as fox hunting. The English of the day almost took pride in their tough attitudes toward animals, as if these reflected a courageous national character. The House of Commons first considered an animal protection bill aimed at bull baiting in 1800, but few members attended the debate; the bill died. The Times remarked that the issue was beneath the dignity of Parliament. After all, it was a sport that fostered “courage.” Like the poor and enslaved, domesticated animals endured vicious treatment—in the animals’ case, live vivisection, torture, and ruthless exploitation.

  A genuine concern for animal welfare took generations to manifest itself, almost two centuries after Ireland proscribed pulling wool off sheep. The first concrete steps came at the behest of Colonel Richard Martin, an Irish Member of Parliament with a penchant for dueling (and winning). He campaigned against bear baiting and dog fighting, a struggle that culminated in the Ill Treatment of Cattle Bill of 1822.5 Amended legislation covered all domesticated, four-footed beasts. Two years later, the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals came into being.6 (In 1840, it became the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, or RSPCA.) In 1835, an amendment to the 1822 act forbade animal baiting and animal fighting contests. The 1835 legislation aimed firmly at lower-class blood sports with all the social disorder they seemed to propagate. Gentlemen’s field sports, such as fishing, fox hunting, and shooting, continued to flourish, being outside the law.

  The SPCA came into being to enforce the Martin law, but it was not until 1832 that it had enough members to begin publishing its ever-more-elaborate annual reports, which documented its lobbying efforts and court cases in which the society’s enforcement officers had intervened and prosecuted offenders successfully. The reports pulled no punches, but were aimed almost entirely at the “lower classes,” especially people working with horses, donkeys, and dogs. One report told a heartbreaking story of a horse “covered with sweat, and in the greatest possible agony, and although [the beast was] wholly unable to move, the prisoner continued beating it on the sides with the sharp edge of a steel stay busk, having broken a thick stick over it, a part of which he still carried.”7 The RSPCA was one of the great philanthropic successes of the nineteenth century. By 1900 it had achieved a level of respectability where it was “one of the standard charities remembered by British maiden ladies and others when making their wills.”8

  The society faced a task of mindboggling scale when animal power was a staple of urban life, mining, and agriculture. The RSPCA’s main focus was on working animals and the often-illiterate people who handled them. Many draft and packhorses wilted under heavy loads, and collapsed, to be cast into a ditch. As early as 1581, Sir Thomas Wroth counted twenty-one hundred horses traveling between Shoreditch and Enfield, near London. Another observer remarked that two thousand of them would be dead in a ditch within seven years. The casualties were much higher by the eighteenth century, with many more beasts on the road.

  For a long time, scientists pondered a fundamental question. How much power would a horse supply, not only when hauling, but also when engaged in other tasks? In 1699, for example, a group of scientists associated with the French Academy compared the horizontal pushing force of a horse and a man.9 They concluded that a horse provided the equivalent of six or seven men. In this way of thinking, equines and human workers were a form of interchangeable machinery.

  This was no mere academic argument in a Europe heavily dependent on animal powe
r, where the doctrines of René Descartes held powerful sway. Horses and oxen turned grain mills and operated factory machinery. They powered water pumps that emptied mine shafts, sawed wood, and provided power for everything from ferries to construction equipment and cranes. Descartes had proclaimed animals to be like machines, an attractive proposition for owners, who valued their beasts for their profit potential. By the late eighteenth century, the notion of machinelike animals in the service of people held powerful sway. As noted earlier, Robert Bakewell spent his career trying to find out which animal was best for turning food into money. There was a different calculation for those who operated working horses. The best animals were those that produced the most work for the least food.

  The machine arguments gained even more authority with the patenting of the steam engine by James Watt in 1775. In a stroke of genius, Watt created a measure he called “horsepower,” which he defined as 4,562 kilogram meters (33,000 foot pounds) a minute.10 His engines often replaced dray horses in factories, so he developed his method of estimating power by experimenting with strong dray animals as a way of calculating how many horses a steam engine would replace. One of Watt’s customers, a Nottingham cotton manufacturer, used a steam engine to replace the eight to ten horses that powered his mill. London brewery operators were also early users of steam engines instead of horses. Watt’s “horsepower” measurement may have been a crude approximation, but the term is still in use today in the automobile industry. When a French engineer, Baron Prony, invented the dynamometer in 1821 as a way of measuring force overcoming resistance in motion, generations of research enabled comparisons among different animals. Even in the face of steam engines, working horses remained profit-making machines for farmers and transportation companies, but also for mines.

  Underground Ponies

  From the mid-eighteenth century, thousands of ponies labored deep underground in coal mines, especially in Britain and Australia, but also, to a limited extent, in the United States.11 As mines expanded and distances from the mineshaft to the working face became longer, animals replaced women and child laborers. Pit ponies were small and compact, rarely more than twelve hands high, invariably geldings or stallions. They were low set and thick bodied, their bones heavy set and strong. Many British pit ponies were Shetlands, and animals were imported from as far away as Iceland and Russia. They were often stabled deep underground and worked for as long as twenty years, but usually for much shorter lifetimes, seemingly adapting to the dark and working up to eight hours a day. The best animals were those of equable temperament, aged between about four and five years. Their retirement aboveground tended to be short, as they had trouble adjusting to herd behavior and the open air. Some were born underground and never saw the light of day. Mine owners tended to feed them well, on chopped hay and maize, and provide ample freshwater and good ventilation, bringing them to the surface only when the mine closed during colliery holidays. They also made sure that one hauler was responsible for a specific beast, so that a bond was created between them.

  The use of pit ponies continued throughout the nineteenth century, against a background of steadily rising public concern about their treatment. Such ponies became a catalyst for animal welfare movements, but little changed for decades. The Coal Mines Regulation Act of 1887 provided the first legislation to protect pit ponies, but was limited to providing inspectors and regulating the height of haulage-way roofs. Protest groups such as the National Equine Defence League and the Scottish Society to Promote Kindness to Pit Ponies put so much pressure on the government that a royal commission was formed. In 1911, new legislation required daily logs, a competent horse trainer for every fifteen ponies, and a minimum working age of four years. At the height of pony hauling in 1913, there were as many as seventy thousand ponies underground in Britain, but they were gradually replaced by mechanical hauling, being used mainly on shorter runs in later times. By the late 1930s, their number had dropped to thirty-two thousand. As recently as 1985, there were still 561 ponies underground in Britain. The last beast retired in 1999. There are now finally moves to ban the use of pit ponies, but in fact technology has effectively replaced them.

  Figure 17.1 Pit ponies in a Welsh colliery, 1931. Science & Society/Superstock.

  The Urban Beast

  Pit ponies labored far from daylight; many more equines worked in growing urban settings. The factories and cities of an increasingly industrialized Britain and Europe may have hailed the advantages of steam, but they still relied heavily on animal power, not only in mines, but to haul loads, plow the soil, and operate grain mills—to mention only a few tasks. Steam locomotives carried food and freight to city terminals, but there remained the problems of onward transport, local delivery, and public transportation (see the sidebar “Horse Buses”). Urban horse populations skyrocketed, rising faster than human ones by the 1870s. Cities with more than a hundred thousand people averaged about one horse per fifteen people, but the ratio varied widely from city to city. In 1900, 130, 000 horses worked in Manhattan, while Chicago had 74,000, and Philadelphia 51,000.12 These figures refer to animals housed in the city, not to those stabled on cheaper suburban land or farm animals that hauled produce to urban consumers. Every late nineteenth-century city depended heavily on workhorses for both stationary tasks and hauling. They even moved entire houses using capstans. For all its technological prowess, the early Industrial Revolution depended just as heavily on beasts. As late as 1850, animal energy provided 52.4 percent of total work output—probably an underestimate.13 As railroads came into being, fewer and fewer people rode horses except for farmers, jockeys on racetracks, the military, and the police. The number of leisure riders was tiny.

  Horse Buses

  The double-decker buses and motor coaches of today are the descendants of a long tradition of horse-drawn transport in urban settings that began nearly two centuries ago. It’s safe to say that horses shaped public transport in nineteenth-century cities, for they made it possible for passengers to travel longer distances, from one neighborhood to another, to stores, or from a railroad station to home. Horses hauled omnibuses as early as the 1820s, the first service being in Nantes, France, beginning in 1823. The owner, Stanislaus Baudry, named his new vehicle voiture omnibus, “vehicle for all.” The idea caught on; Baudry expanded to Bordeaux, and then into Paris. On the other side of the Channel, tollgate keeper John Greenwood founded the first British bus line, with two horses and carts equipped with longitudinal wooden benches. Unlike with stagecoaches, no reservations were necessary. Greenwood and others developed a network of bus services, many of them feeders to railway stations. An enterprising coachbuilder, George Shillibeer, started London’s first formal bus service in 1829, developing a “new vehicle . . . capable of accommodating 16 or 18 persons, all inside.”14 The bus looked like a horse-drawn van, but with windows on the sides. Three nicely matched bay horses hauled the omnibus. The service was an immediate success, contributing to a boom in horse-drawn omnibuses. In 1851, horse buses carried thousands of people to the Great Exhibition at Crystal Palace in fine style, but business slumped thereafter, as demand plummeted. By this time, horse-drawn omnibus services were commonplace in European cities. Horse buses had appeared in New York City in the late 1820s.

  Figure 17.2 A New Zealand stamp depicting a horse omnibus. Such vehicles became widespread in the mid- to late-nineteenth century. Shutterstock.

  Around 1860, mass-produced, affordable steel made it possible to run horse buses on rails, which ensured a much smoother ride than on unpaved streets. The horses could now cover longer distances and haul three to ten times the people. The number of London horse buses peaked at 3,736 vehicles in 1900, most drawn by two beasts. There were also express suburban services that ran into the City of London, drawn by four carefully matched horses. But progress caught up with equine transportation during the 1890s. Electric propulsion and tram lines now offered a viable alternative, without the logistical problems of disposing of manure, transporting fodde
r, and so on. Within two decades, horse buses vanished from London’s streets, the last one in August 1914, although outlying rural bus lines remained in service until as late as 1931. They survived in Berlin until 1923.

  Horse buses were pretty basic transportation, with little more than wooden benches for passengers to sit on. Double-deckers were commonplace. The upper passengers sat on longitudinal wooden benches open to the elements. From the beginning, horse-drawn omnibuses were middle-class urban transportation. The poor continued to walk to work until cheaper tram and train fares appeared in the 1890s.

  Looking after working horses challenged even experts. A well-known American engineer, Robert Thurston, remarked in 1895 that the oat-fueled horse was not only intelligent and willing, but “a self-contained prime mover.” Many factors came into play: diet, the amount of food consumed, and fatigue levels after eight-hour shifts. There were studies of gaits and of average speeds of draft and coach horses—the optimum speed, according to Thurston, being about 4 kilometers (2.5 miles) an hour. Eventually, controlled experiments with dynamometers showed that streetcar horses used seven times the energy to start the vehicle they were towing than to keep it moving. The Chicago Street Railway produced figures that showed that horses cost $0.0372 per car mile to operate, compared with electric cars, at $0.02371.15 The study may have been a powerful factor in the disappearance of the horse from city streets. But for generations, working horses were profitable, which made the RSPCA’s task even harder.

  Equipment became increasingly important, including horse blankets, and blinders (blinkers), which calmed horses in heavy traffic. After trial-and-error testing, many companies limited their horses to five hours’ work daily. Longer working days, with their constant stopping and starting, increased the incidence of injuries to the leg, always the weak spot. Street railways depreciated their horses over five years, then sold them even if they were healthy, knowing that lameness increased thereafter. These preventive strategies were so successful that attempts to replace horse-drawn vehicles with steam-powered ones failed.