176 



MODERN HORSE MANAGEMENT 



[CHAP. 



the coming show. The reply came that he did 

 not know in which class to show it, whereupon 

 he was told : " Cut its tail off and enter it in the 

 hackney class." 



Advocates of docking will dock a horse in any 

 country ; one has only to see the tailless hackney 

 in fly-stricken countries to verify this. English 

 and Scottish horse shows are responsible for 

 the terrible fly torture in Canada and other hot 

 summer countries, the docked Clyde mare being 

 one of the worst examples of ignorance, foolish- 

 ness, and cruelty. 



A pair of freshly-docked horses was seen in 

 Ottawa about eight years ago on the streets with 

 the wounds dripping with blood. The matter 

 was taken up and the case prosecuted. A police 

 inspector came into the office of the Toronto 

 S.P.C.A. and said that he had just seen a horse 

 docked, the hot iron applied intermittently for 

 twenty-eight minutes. This case was also prose- 

 cuted. 



I noticed a sign of modern times in the Ladies' 

 Field a few months ago. An advertisement read : 

 " Mare Mona, very smart, bay, undocked, i5 

 hands, 6 years, quiet to ride or drive, etc." 



A well-known London firm of jobmasters, 

 when they send horses out on hire, request that 

 the hairs of the tails be neither trimmed nor 

 pulled. 



694. Will such cruelty be left unpunished? 

 The following examples of retribution over- 

 taking persons who were guilty of cruelty to 

 horses may be attributed by some to the long 

 arm of coincidence, yet I feel they afford an 

 answer in the negative to the above question. 



A farmer in Western Canada was boasting 

 one day of having docked a number of his Clydes 

 for a coming show ; that night his wife suddenly 

 died. 



A horse dealer who formerly docked a 

 number of horses lost his leg as a result of a 

 kick from one of his victims. 



A veterinary surgeon was badly mauled by a 

 horse whom he had mutilated ; he never re- 

 covered. 



A foreman of a stable had a number of his 

 horses docked secretly ; three weeks afterwards 

 his little boy chopped one of his feet off with 

 an axe. 



The proprietors of " Reducine " say : " A man 

 who docks a horse commits a crime. Every 

 person who has a horse docked is an accessory 

 to the crime. Every person who uses a docked 

 horse is an accessory after the crime, and by his 

 or her influence stimulates or encourages the 

 commission of the crime." 



695. Since writing the foregoing sections a 

 Bill has been introduced by Sir John Rolleston 

 into the House of Commons to forbid the dock- 

 ing of horses, and supported by a large number 

 of the leading horsemen in London. Mr. Walter 

 Winans, the celebrated American millionaire 



horseman, has done an immense amount of good 

 in supporting this Bill by demonstrations in 

 public with his beautiful long-tailed horses. He 

 has also had cinematograph photographs ex- 

 hibited all over London and the provinces, of 

 the operation of docking, and also films showing 

 the beauty of a natural tail and the method of 

 training horses to become accustomed to getting 

 the reins under the tail. I received a letter from 

 him in which he stated that the only opposition 

 he got were rude letters of abuse from men who 

 believed in docking. This shows the sort of men 

 who advocate the continuance of this barbarous 

 practice. 



696. By request of the editors of some fifty 

 of the leading newspapers in the United King- 

 dom, Canada, and the United States, I have 

 prepared articles on the subject of docking. 

 The following section is a summary of the points 

 brought forward in this chapter, and is very 

 similar to the articles just referred to. It is 

 reproduced here by kind permission of the editor 

 of the Canadian Citizen (Ottawa). 



The number of letters I have received from 

 the Royal Family, notable horsemen, political 

 personages, and others on both sides of the 

 Atlantic is sufficient evidence of the influential 

 opinion against the mutilation of the horse. 



Summary 



697. Why does a civilised people allow dock- 

 ing? Anyone who has had much experience, 

 and who has studied the horse closely, must have 

 realised how brutal and foolish is the fashion of 

 docking. In support of a Bill now before the 

 British Parliament, it is only right and fair to 

 our friend the horse that a few points should 

 be brought out, points that absolutely prove that 

 docking is never necessary (except in one in a 

 million cases, due to accident), and that its 

 present existence is due to only one thing, the 

 show ring, and notably the English hackney, 

 Shire and Clydesdale show ring. The chief use 

 of the tail is not as generally known as it ought 

 to be. There is a fly muscle extending all over 

 the neck (except at the crest, where the mane 

 reaches), thoracic region, forearm, the loins and 

 abdominal region. This muscle (the panniculus 

 carnosus) does not extend over the hindquarters 

 posterior to the hips or between the thighs. It 

 is used whenever the horse wishes to twitch the 

 skin to rid itself of flies. If a horse is docked, it 

 can never have any defence from the fly over 

 the parts mentioned above. If the hair has 

 only been banged off, as is common with some 

 harness horses and military horses, the tail will 

 still reach over the quarters. 



It is barbarous to turn a docked horse out to 

 pasture when the flies are active. The tail that 

 has been banged, even very short, will soon 

 grow again ; a docked tail never will. This is 

 why the veterinary profession, with which I was 



