Tractor heritage, news and features

The beauty of working horses

A pair of powerful draught horses at work is indeed a magnificent spectacle, and is almost enough to make one begin to regret that the combustion engine was ever invented. There are times when I’m fairly certain that the demise of our sense of community has two things to blame – namely the motor car and the television. But of course it’s easy to view ‘the good old days’ through rose-tinted spectacles when you weren’t actually there to witness it all first-hand.

We do all know deep down that not everything about ‘the good old days’ was actually that good! I’m thinking of poverty, disease, and cruelty particularly. The landscape might have looked more picturesque (from a safe distance at least) with its wooden hay carts and long-frocked milk maids, but life was certainly no picnic for most people who actually had to work on the land day in day out without the modern conveniences that we all take for granted today.

I’m sure it was no picnic being a horse in those days either. Today, in this country at least, it is generally only people who love horse that keep them and work them. In the past however, horses would have been nothing more than a necessity for most people, and many would have been expected to pretty much work themselves to death for their owners.

When Anna Sewell wrote Black Beauty in 1877 she described the scenes of cruelty towards working horses that she witnessed in her everyday life. Being partially crippled, she was heavily dependent on horse drawn transport and it was this that led to her concerns for equine welfare. She was said to have been instrumental in abolishing the use of the ‘Bearing Rein’ – a leather strap which was fixed to the heads of Victorian carriage horses in order to keep their heads fashionably high. These straps were painful and damaging to a horse’s neck and the terribly unnatural position that the horse’s head was forced into made it very difficult for a horse to pull a heavy load, particularly uphill.

Sewell was aware that there were kind owners and cruel owners, and that it was often just a matter of luck which sort of owner a horse ended up with. Black Beauty has long been considered a children’s book, but Sewell originally wrote it for those who handled horses, in order to “induce kindness, sympathy and an understanding treatment of horses”.

So whenever I find myself wishing that horses were still in regular use for transport, haulage and farm work, I have to remind myself that I’m not sure I’d want to see some poor old horse having to drag an overloaded cart full of coal up the huge hill to my home. Having said that, it’s important we don’t let the traditions of breeding, training and working these marvellous creatures die out. Nowadays though we are working horses because we want to, not because we have to, and let’s hope that makes it easier for us to be kind and patient with them.

Tractors have a lot of advantages over horses. Sometimes what is great about tractors is that aren’t capable of feeling pain or fear and that quite simply, they don’t think. Which brings to mind an old story I once heard about a man who was disc harrowing a field with a his pair of faithful old Shire horses. The harrow was of the ride on variety, and as the machine went over an unexpected dip in the field the man was thrown forward towards the heels of his horses, but while he was airborne he shouted ‘whoa’. The horses stopped and stood quite still awaiting the next command, but the man had fallen between the vicious discs of the harrow and the heels of the horses, and although unharmed he had been knocked unconscious.

Some hours later darkness began to fall and his wife wondered why he hadn’t returned home. Going down to the ploughed field to look for him she found him lying between the horses and the implement, with the horses still standing patiently, because the last word their owner had uttered was ‘whoa’. If they had moved just a few inches he would have been mangled by the disc harrow, but as it was he was dragged to safety and made a full recovery. So while the beauty of a tractor might be its ‘off’ switch, there’s no way you could ever rely on any machine to hang on to your every last word.