380 MODE OF TAMING AND BREAKING-IN HORSES. 
yet, when I came to reflect, if we are to tame wild beasts and to 
quiet horses by inspiring them with terror, this, probably, is as 
summary a way of proceeding as any, and not, after all, so cruel as 
others that might be mentioned. For instance, it was said that 
Van Amburgh awed his lions and tigers into submission through 
being armed with a red-hot iron staff. It is pretty certain that 
the Irish whisperer practised cruelty in some form, and that not 
of a mild description. That the blows from the spiked balls 
caused both contusion and puncture, with more or less pain, will 
not be denied. This, however, is all the immediate or topical in- 
jury they did, through which, comparatively trifling in itself, they 
engendered in the animal’s system a sense of fear of that intensity 
that awed him into obedience to the performance of acts by nature 
or habit most disagreeable to him. The Duke of Newcastle’s 
maxim was — We must make our horses fear us to love us, and, 
taking the various systems of breaking and managing horses, the 
inspiring of fear will be found the grand object of their divers 
practices and contrivances ; love being but a secondary or minor 
ingredient in their composition. In South America, where the 
wild horses caught with the lasso are to be summarily broken-in 
for use, the method of doing so, is to put a saddle and bridle on 
the wild animal while he is entrammelled by the lasso, and then 
place an expert rider upon his back, and so mounted, suffer him to 
rise upon his feet. Should his plunges after being unshackled for 
liberty dismount his rider, he is again cast and mounted without a 
minute’s loss of time, and the combat between him and his rider 
renewed : and thus the breaking is persevered in until conquest 
and submission are attained. 
In our own country, wherein castration is so extensively prac- 
tised, and colts and fillies are from their very birth housed, and 
more or less handled, and thus prematurely rendered tractable, 
such harsh breaking is not called for, neither is it practised ; al- 
though the old method of breaking was, as far as whip and spur 
and bit are concerned, severe enough amongst ourselves, and still 
is in some parts of the rural districts practised with the same rude 
severity as ever. There can be no doubt, that a great deal of 
the breaking we are saved in this country arises from the domes- 
tic handling the colt so frequently experiences from his very colt- 
hood. By early handling, horses of good temper become, with a 
little training at the proper age, sufficiently quiet for use ; and 
such as are of bad temper have, by kind usage, their vicious na- 
ture so far at least altered, that few of them turn out afterwards 
unbreakable by the ordinary course of manege. 
It has been suggested by many humane equestrians, that we 
should adopt a mode of breaking founded entirely upon love — • 
