510 A MANUAL OF VETERINARY PHYSIOLOGY 



dog as the standard to judge by, it may be said with the greatest 

 truth that the large majority of horses have no affection what- 

 ever, either for their own kind (excluding maternal affection) or 

 for human beings. There are exceptions, a kind groom is 

 appreciated, and a pair of horses may become greatly attached, or 

 a horse may become very fond of a cat. The liking of mules for 

 the grey mare which leads the troop is well known. Nevertheless, 

 two strange horses cannot as a rule be put together without 

 disagreeing, and no one ever heard of a horse pining away 

 through the prolonged absence of his master. The often- 

 quoted example of a horse jumping over a man on the ground 

 rather than treading on him is an act misunderstood ; it is. 

 true the horse jumps over the man, but he does so because; 

 he is taught to jump over every obstacle, and the man on the 

 ground might, for all he knows, be a bush. In other words, it 

 becomes largely a reflex, and only to a very limited extent a. 

 volitional act. If the leading members of a flock of sheep are 

 made to jump over an obstacle, and the obstacle then be removed „ 

 all the succeeding sheep will continue to jump on arriving at the 

 same spot. 



If the horse possesses but little affection it is compensated 

 for by cherishing no resentment ; he will kick his friend as readily 

 as a foe, or, in many cases, his groom with as much cheerfulness 

 as a perfect stranger ; to all his hard life and the abominable 

 cruelties of domestication he shows no sign of resentment ; 

 water and feed him, and give him a place to lie in, and he forgets 

 the past in his anxiety for the present. He is a peculiar 

 mixture of courage and cowardice ; physical suffering he can 

 endure, no animal bears pain better ; when his blood is up 

 nothing is too big or too wide for him in the hunting-field, and 

 he has a keen enjoyment for both chase and race in spite of the 

 punishment they may entail. But the same horse is frightened 

 out of his life by a piece of paper blowing across the road, or at 

 his own shadow, and an unusual sight, or a heap of stones on the 

 side of the road has cost many a man his life. No animal is 

 more readily seized with panic, and this spreads amongst a body 

 of horses like an electric shock. Yet panic must not be held to 

 indicate an absence of reason, though the rapidity of its spread 

 in the case of a stampede may suggest it. There are other 

 animals than the horse affected by panic. The dog, with all 

 his intelligence, is acutely affected by a pot tied to his tail, but 

 it does not cause all the dogs he meets to stampede. Panic is 

 not unknown in the highest animal, and reason does not prevent it. 



Reasoning power in the majority of horses is very small ; an 

 animal runs away because he is seized with panic, or his spirits are 

 bubbling over. Yet he has sufficient reasoning powers to learn 



