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he is scarcely even fit to carry his own weight, instead 

 of dragging a trap or a cart behind him. Can anyone, 

 however impressive, exaggerate the barbarity of such 

 conduct on the part of a man ? Alas ! the task would 

 be impossible. And the man who abuses an old 

 horse in the yoke is a cold, unfeeling coward, and 

 wholly unworthy to be entrusted with the care of a 

 dumb animal. And second to the dastard who inflicts 

 the actual cruelty is the former owner of the horse. 

 He may have bred him, and may have taken ten, 

 fifteen, or even twenty years of hard work out of him, 

 when, for the sake of pure greed, he will sell him into 

 a life of misery for little more than the price of his 

 skin ! It is infinitely more humane to immediately 

 destroy a horse when he becomes unfit for work by 

 the approach of that stern conqueror, old age. Here 

 and there we come across a benevolent man who 

 makes a pensioner of his horse after he has served his 

 term, but even then it remains to be questioned 

 whether it would not be more humane to destroy him, 

 because he is often reduced to a miserable cripple 

 moving about in constant agony. 



BEST METHOD OF DESTRUCTION. 



Numerous methods have been suggested to pro- 

 cure euthanasy, such as suffocation by charcoal fumes, 

 blood blowing, etc., but they are necessarily slow 

 methods, and unless a man is of a callous disposition 

 he can hardly carry them out successfully. Therefore, 

 although the word has a harsh ring about it, the 



