A Horse Misused, Part 2

Some reflections on the ideal of horsepower

Photo by Sigmund on Unsplash

There are unknown worlds of knowledge in brutes; and whenever you mark a horse, or a dog, with a peculiarly mild, calm, deep-seated eye, be sure he is an Aristotle or a Kant, tranquilly speculating upon the mysteries in man. No philosophers so thoroughly comprehend us as dogs and horses. They see through us at a glance. And after all, what is a horse but a species of four-footed dumb man, in a leathern overall, who happens to live upon oats, and toils for his masters, half-requited or abused, like the biped hewers of wood and drawers of water? But there is a touch of divinity even in brutes, and a special halo about a horse, that should forever exempt him from indignities. As for those majestic, magisterial truck-horses of the docks, I would as soon think of striking a judge on the bench, as to lay violent hand upon their holy hides.  —Herman Melville

The past, admittedly, is more appealing to me than any utopian future conjured by philosophers, sci-fi writers, or activists, which always seems to involve the warehousing of an overpopulous humanity in urban habitats. For me, this would be a prison sentence. As I’ve often said, every utopia is someone else’s dystopia, and an urban future is mine. No matter how perfectly planned or technologically advanced the world’s metropolitan terrariums may be, they’ll always be devoid of nature’s plan, lacking in privacy, dense with inescapable multitudes, and devoid of the natural world’s unintended beauty. Worst of all, they’ll always be lacking in open space for meadows and forests to grow and large animals like deer and horses to graze and run free. Cities are all the levels of The Inferno collapsed, accordionlike, on itself.

Photo by Alexandr Bormotin on Unsplash

For the last 4-5,000 years, the best mode of land travel across Eurasia and eventually the world was by horse. For me, this is a feature, not a bug. I’ve been riding since I was five years old. I’ve loved horses since the moment I set eyes on them, and if I could imagine a utopia of my own, it would be one where horses were essential again. All the infrastructure would be designed to accommodate them. But, the pastoral past was hardly perfect, especially if you cared about animal welfare.

Sadly, this utopia of mine would be a dystopia for others, none more so than the horses themselves. How do I know this? History. Experience. And another shocking incident of abuse.

If you’re not a New Yorker, you may not have heard about the carriage horse, Ryder, who collapsed in the city streets last August. I posted about the incident here and expressed my doubts about the horse’s EPM diagnosis. It turns out that’s not the only thing that was bullshit about the story.

I had expressed privately to friends that the horse’s veterinarian seemed shady—it turned out that he was a retired racetrack vet. If you’re familiar with racetracks, you’ll know what that means. Then it was revealed that Ryder was not 13 years old, as the carriage driver had initially told police and is on the horse’s official documentation, but he was at least 26 years old. This is a senior horse requiring special care and a reduced workload. A horse’s approximate age can be determined by evaluating the wear patterns on its teeth. As horses age, new tooth patterns emerge from the jaw as older surfaces wear away (where the expression “never look a gift horse in the mouth” comes from). Any vet would have known this. Any halfway knowledgeable horse owner also should have known this. Which means the horse’s owners deliberately falsified his records.

Photo by Ralph Darabos on Unsplash

Reports since the incident have been vague, but Ryder’s condition continued to deteriorate, and he was euthanized in October of last year after collapsing and having a seizure. While a necroscopy was supposedly performed, no official diagnosis has been given for his condition. Vets caring for him in his retirement speculated that his decline was due to lymphoma rather than EPM. Lymphoma in horses is somewhat rare but not unknown in older horses. My rescue horse, Grady, passed from complications due to the disease. If this is the correct diagnosis, it would explain Ryder’s terrible condition in those photos. He was clearly a very sick horse who should not have been working under any circumstances.

Speaking to the New York Times, a spokesperson for the carriage industry was unwilling to acknowledge that these owners fucked up even a little:

Ms. Hansen, a carriage driver and the industry spokeswoman, said that the blame was unfairly placed. “We are really sad that he has passed,” she said of Ryder. ‘Horses can be healthier and safer in New York City than in any other place, but because they are animals they sometimes get hurt, sometimes get sick and sometimes die.’

Horses can be healthier and safer in NYC than in any other place? Please. My horses, who don’t work in heavy traffic, tread all day on pavement, breathe fumes, or live in cramped stables, beg to differ. They live in a herd, breathe fresh air, drink fresh water, and graze ample pastures all day. Oh, and no one expects them to work when they’re malnourished, sick, or injured.

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Having said that…

I’m not a car person like some who love cars. I don’t get excited about makes and models or engines. I’ll admit I do miss my Jeep and manual transmissions. I wish cars would stop trying to boss me!—I’ll do the driving, thank you. But I know almost nothing about how cars work. I’m not proud of this, and I’m learning, but being a gearhead is not a priority in my life. When I first began driving, I neglected to change the oil for so long that my car ran completely dry, and the engine seized up. My dad, who started his career as an auto mechanic, was not impressed, and you can imagine I got a good lecture afterward. The car was rescued, and I never forget oil changes now. But a car is inanimate; its parts are replaceable. I felt stupid and irresponsible for neglecting my car, but I didn’t feel remorse for it. I could never have forgiven myself if it had been a horse.

There’s no room for that kind of error with an animal. They’re far more complex than any car, and learning to “drive” and care for them must be a priority.

Erik Hoel recently mused about an ideal “high-tech pastoral” future: “We’d all commute only via horses and, ah, electric bikes.” Paul Kingsnorth, who formerly crusaded against cars as an environmental activist, has written wistfully about the world before engines:  

Often I have wondered at what it would have been like to live in a world without engines; to experience human life without the hum or roar or traffic or the smell of petrol and diesel. This new world is scarcely a century old, but it has changed everything. The distance we can travel has remodelled and homogenised the entire globe. Motorways have replaced country lanes, careless speed has replaced actual travel. Entire cities have been demolished, along with entire ways of being. It is impossible for us to feel the world as it was when the sound of transport was the sound of horses’ hooves and the wash of boats. It is impossible for us to imagine a world without oil refineries and plastic everything. The car took it all away.

On a primal level, I’m right there with them. This is the world I most deeply wish for. My perfect world would have almost no motorized vehicles and specially designated tracks and trails just for walking and horseback riding (in my world, I could do without the cyclists, frankly.) I live my life around horses, and I, too, long for a quieter, slower-paced world with less… everything.

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But I also know it comes with its own costs. Perfect worlds are not possible because they are inhabited by imperfect people. What was certainly friendlier to the environment has not always been kind to the horses. And though the peace and serenity of an uncongested country lane or highway and the lack of exhaust fumes may do wonders for the human spirit, something far darker settles into some humans in the presence of horses.

I don’t quite know why, and I suspect the reasons differ for different people. For some, it’s simple fear. For others, it’s the desire to prove something, to dominate another being—especially one so powerful. And for others, perhaps it’s the anxiety around being made a fool of for not being obeyed, respected, loved. I’ve also seen too many riders turn good horses into maniacs to conceal their lack of tact, the way a musician who can’t coax beautiful music from his instrument might resort to thrashing the strings and dialing up the distortion. Worst of all, there are those to whom animals are simply property, expendable, and despite all the evidence of the equines’ emotional lives—their fear, pain, affection—some have no qualms about hurting them. Historical accounts (and some modern ones) relate dozens of incidents in which horses were simply ridden to death—pushed to the limits of exhaustion until they drop, like cars run out of gas by the side of the road.

I love the notion of returning to a culture where horses are valued and have the right of way on the roads. I imagine that if I were ever an eccentric billionaire, I wouldn’t spend my excess wealth on building dumb dong-rockets to nowhere. I’d buy up acres of pastureland, old abandoned villages, and miles of bridlepaths so horses would be the only means of transportation throughout the land. But after years of seeing how even professional horsemen treat equines, I shudder to think how the average non-horsemen would deal with them. Would we choose to do right by them, or are we humanly incapable?

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A fearful dream

I’ve been (slowly) reading Crime and Punishment, and it lives up to its reputation as a beautiful, difficult, and dark novel. But no part of it for me has been as disturbing or memorable—not even the visceral murders at the center of the story—as this passage which describes in excruciating detail a dream, a memory, of a horse being brutalized by its owner and a mob of onlookers:

Raskolnikov had a fearful dream. He dreamt he was back in his childhood in the little town of his birth. He was a child about seven years old, walking into the country with his father on the evening of a holiday. It was a grey and heavy day, the country was exactly as he remembered it; indeed he recalled it far more vividly in his dream than he had done in memory. The little town stood on a level flat as bare as the hand, not even a willow near it; only in the far distance, a copse lay, a dark blur on the very edge of the horizon. A few paces beyond the last market garden stood a tavern, a big tavern, which had always aroused in him a feeling of aversion, even of fear, when he walked by it with his father. There was always a crowd there, always shouting, laughter and abuse, hideous hoarse singing and often fighting. Drunken and horrible-looking figures were hanging about the tavern. He used to cling close to his father, trembling all over when he met them. Near the tavern the road became a dusty track, the dust of which was always black. It was a winding road, and about a hundred paces further on, it turned to the right to the graveyard. In the middle of the graveyard stood a stone church with a green cupola where he used to go to mass two or three times a year with his father and mother, when a service was held in memory of his grandmother, who had long been dead, and whom he had never seen. On these occasions they used to take on a white dish tied up in a table napkin a special sort of rice pudding with raisins stuck in it in the shape of a cross. He loved that church, the old-fashioned, unadorned ikons and the old priest with the shaking head. Near his grandmother’s grave, which was marked by a stone, was the little grave of his younger brother who had died at six months old. He did not remember him at all, but he had been told about his little brother, and whenever he visited the graveyard he used religiously and reverently to cross himself and to bow down and kiss the little grave. And now he dreamt that he was walking with his father past the tavern on the way to the graveyard; he was holding his father’s hand and looking with dread at the tavern. A peculiar circumstance attracted his attention: there seemed to be some kind of festivity going on, there were crowds of gaily dressed townspeople, peasant women, their husbands, and riff-raff of all sorts, all singing and all more or less drunk. Near the entrance of the tavern stood a cart, but a strange cart. It was one of those big carts usually drawn by heavy cart-horses and laden with casks of wine or other heavy goods. He always liked looking at those great cart-horses, with their long manes, thick legs, and slow even pace, drawing along a perfect mountain with no appearance of effort, as though it were easier going with a load than without it. But now, strange to say, in the shafts of such a cart he saw a thin little sorrel beast, one of those peasants’ nags which he had often seen straining their utmost under a heavy load of wood or hay, especially when the wheels were stuck in the mud or in a rut. And the peasants would beat them so cruelly, sometimes even about the nose and eyes, and he felt so sorry, so sorry for them that he almost cried, and his mother always used to take him away from the window. All of a sudden there was a great uproar of shouting, singing and the balalaïka, and from the tavern a number of big and very drunken peasants came out, wearing red and blue shirts and coats thrown over their shoulders.

“Get in, get in!” shouted one of them, a young thick-necked peasant with a fleshy face red as a carrot. “I’ll take you all, get in!”

But at once there was an outbreak of laughter and exclamations in the crowd.

“Take us all with a beast like that!”

“Why, Mikolka, are you crazy to put a nag like that in such a cart?”

“And this mare is twenty if she is a day, mates!”

“Get in, I’ll take you all,” Mikolka shouted again, leaping first into the cart, seizing the reins and standing straight up in front. “The bay has gone with Matvey,” he shouted from the cart—”and this brute, mates, is just breaking my heart, I feel as if I could kill her. She’s just eating her head off. Get in, I tell you! I’ll make her gallop! She’ll gallop!” and he picked up the whip, preparing himself with relish to flog the little mare.

“Get in! Come along!” The crowd laughed. “D’you hear, she’ll gallop!”

“Gallop indeed! She has not had a gallop in her for the last ten years!”

“She’ll jog along!”

“Don’t you mind her, mates, bring a whip each of you, get ready!”

“All right! Give it to her!”

They all clambered into Mikolka’s cart, laughing and making jokes. Six men got in and there was still room for more. They hauled in a fat, rosy-cheeked woman. She was dressed in red cotton, in a pointed, beaded headdress and thick leather shoes; she was cracking nuts and laughing. The crowd round them was laughing too and indeed, how could they help laughing? That wretched nag was to drag all the cartload of them at a gallop! Two young fellows in the cart were just getting whips ready to help Mikolka. With the cry of “now,” the mare tugged with all her might, but far from galloping, could scarcely move forward; she struggled with her legs, gasping and shrinking from the blows of the three whips which were showered upon her like hail. The laughter in the cart and in the crowd was redoubled, but Mikolka flew into a rage and furiously thrashed the mare, as though he supposed she really could gallop.

“Let me get in, too, mates,” shouted a young man in the crowd whose appetite was aroused.

“Get in, all get in,” cried Mikolka, “she will draw you all. I’ll beat her to death!” And he thrashed and thrashed at the mare, beside himself with fury.

“Father, father,” he cried, “father, what are they doing? Father, they are beating the poor horse!”

“Come along, come along!” said his father. “They are drunken and foolish, they are in fun; come away, don’t look!” and he tried to draw him away, but he tore himself away from his hand, and, beside himself with horror, ran to the horse. The poor beast was in a bad way. She was gasping, standing still, then tugging again and almost falling.

“Beat her to death,” cried Mikolka, “it’s come to that. I’ll do for her!”

“What are you about, are you a Christian, you devil?” shouted an old man in the crowd.

“Did anyone ever see the like? A wretched nag like that pulling such a cartload,” said another.

“You’ll kill her,” shouted the third.

“Don’t meddle! It’s my property, I’ll do what I choose. Get in, more of you! Get in, all of you! I will have her go at a gallop!...”

All at once laughter broke into a roar and covered everything: the mare, roused by the shower of blows, began feebly kicking. Even the old man could not help smiling. To think of a wretched little beast like that trying to kick!

Two lads in the crowd snatched up whips and ran to the mare to beat her about the ribs. One ran each side.

“Hit her in the face, in the eyes, in the eyes,” cried Mikolka.

“Give us a song, mates,” shouted someone in the cart and everyone in the cart joined in a riotous song, jingling a tambourine and whistling. The woman went on cracking nuts and laughing.

... He ran beside the mare, ran in front of her, saw her being whipped across the eyes, right in the eyes! He was crying, he felt choking, his tears were streaming. One of the men gave him a cut with the whip across the face, he did not feel it. Wringing his hands and screaming, he rushed up to the grey-headed old man with the grey beard, who was shaking his head in disapproval. One woman seized him by the hand and would have taken him away, but he tore himself from her and ran back to the mare. She was almost at the last gasp, but began kicking once more.

“I’ll teach you to kick,” Mikolka shouted ferociously. He threw down the whip, bent forward and picked up from the bottom of the cart a long, thick shaft, he took hold of one end with both hands and with an effort brandished it over the mare.

“He’ll crush her,” was shouted round him. “He’ll kill her!”

“It’s my property,” shouted Mikolka and brought the shaft down with a swinging blow. There was a sound of a heavy thud.

“Thrash her, thrash her! Why have you stopped?” shouted voices in the crowd.

And Mikolka swung the shaft a second time and it fell a second time on the spine of the luckless mare. She sank back on her haunches, but lurched forward and tugged forward with all her force, tugged first on one side and then on the other, trying to move the cart. But the six whips were attacking her in all directions, and the shaft was raised again and fell upon her a third time, then a fourth, with heavy measured blows. Mikolka was in a fury that he could not kill her at one blow.

“She’s a tough one,” was shouted in the crowd.

“She’ll fall in a minute, mates, there will soon be an end of her,” said an admiring spectator in the crowd.

“Fetch an axe to her! Finish her off,” shouted a third.

“I’ll show you! Stand off,” Mikolka screamed frantically; he threw down the shaft, stooped down in the cart and picked up an iron crowbar. “Look out,” he shouted, and with all his might he dealt a stunning blow at the poor mare. The blow fell; the mare staggered, sank back, tried to pull, but the bar fell again with a swinging blow on her back and she fell on the ground like a log.

“Finish her off,” shouted Mikolka and he leapt beside himself, out of the cart. Several young men, also flushed with drink, seized anything they could come across—whips, sticks, poles, and ran to the dying mare. Mikolka stood on one side and began dealing random blows with the crowbar. The mare stretched out her head, drew a long breath and died.

“You butchered her,” someone shouted in the crowd.

“Why wouldn’t she gallop then?”

“My property!” shouted Mikolka, with bloodshot eyes, brandishing the bar in his hands. He stood as though regretting that he had nothing more to beat.

“No mistake about it, you are not a Christian,” many voices were shouting in the crowd.

But the poor boy, beside himself, made his way, screaming, through the crowd to the sorrel nag, put his arms round her bleeding dead head and kissed it, kissed the eyes and kissed the lips…. Then he jumped up and flew in a frenzy with his little fists out at Mikolka. At that instant his father, who had been running after him, snatched him up and carried him out of the crowd.

“Come along, come! Let us go home,” he said to him.

“Father! Why did they… kill… the poor horse!” he sobbed, but his voice broke and the words came in shrieks from his panting chest.

“They are drunk…. They are brutal… it’s not our business!” said his father. He put his arms round his father but he felt choked, choked. He tried to draw a breath, to cry out—and woke up.

He waked up, gasping for breath, his hair soaked with perspiration, and stood up in terror.

This excerpt is quoted often, no doubt because it has symbolic significance to the story that literary types love to dissect. It is also a masterpiece of psychological horror. I can’t imagine what the fate of such a passage—or indeed such a novel, filled as Crime and Punishment is with journalistic detail, in-depth character studies, and vivid cinematic cues to each scene—might be today in a literary climate that prides itself on its frugality and has acquiesced to the shrinking attention span.

That’s not why it struck me as it did. I’ve been involved with horses in some capacity for over 40 years. I’ve witnessed the treatment of horses by so-called horsemen which has shocked and horrified me. The stories I’ve heard have been far worse. We no longer rely on horses for transportation, farming, or industrial needs. Today, people who work around horses have self-selected to do so. Yet, they sometimes treat them horrifically. Perhaps not as horribly as in the above passage, but nearly so.

When I read something like this, I’m reminded that there was a period when people who were utterly unsuited to working around horses—who despised, feared, and misunderstood them—dealt with them every day out of necessity rather than choice. And this must have led to unspeakable acts of cruelty. Dostoyevsky put words to one such act, so realistically I have to assume he based it on an actual event. And, even after seeing this sickly carriage horse, Ryder, collapse on a scorching city street, people defend the practice and the company that put him there. They want their romantic tourist experience, horses be damned!

Though the advent of the combustion engine has meant a massive decrease in the equine population over the last hundred years, it has usually meant a better—if far from perfect—quality of life for most horses who remain. Cars may often be at odds with the environment, but they are the best thing to happen to horses. That’s difficult to reconcile when imagining an idealized pastoral world, past or future. We can use our vehicles in almost complete ignorance yet harm no one but ourselves. The same was not true in the era of horses. Whatever problems automobiles may cause, trading one form of transportation for another might treat the symptoms, but it won’t address the sickness.

Cars were never the real problem. We are.

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