Responding to the end of the age of horsepower

[Guest guest]

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, June 2009:

 

 

Responding to the end of the age of horsepower

Commentary by Merritt Clifton

 

 

Completing a defacto " trade " of star players, the Brooke

Hospital for Animals, the world's largest equine aid charity, on

May 4, 2009 announced the appointment of Peter Davies as board

chairperson.

Davies, director general of the World Society for the

Protection of Animals since 2002, succeeds North Carolina Zoo

director David Jones, who had served as interim Brooke chair since

the November 2008 death of predecessor Hilary Weir.

Succeeding Davies at WSPA will be Mike Baker, chief

executive for the Brooke since June 2001.

All trades are billed as likely to help both teams. Only

time will tell what this one achieves, but it is possible that this

one moved players into new positions well suited to their experience.

Baker, previously in management roles with the British Union Against

Vivisection and the International Fund for Animal Welfare, is more a

career animal advocate on multiple fronts than a horse enthusiast

taking on a broader field. Davies, previously director general for

the Royal SPCA, is a horse enthusiast with a global perspective.

Both Baker and Davies have already been helping the

developing world to meet the many challenges presented by the

accelerating transition away from use of horses, donkeys, and mules

for farm work and transport. The job ahead is nothing less than

easing the largely voluntary dissolution of the second largest and

oldest of all of the animal use industries, after raising animals

for slaughter.

The U.S. and Canada made transition away from equine use

relatively gradually during the first half of the 20th century.

Western Europe achieved the same transition during the same decades,

but with two major hiccups, as both World War I and World War II

depleted the regional horse population, never to recover either time

to the numbers preceding the conflicts.

Unfortunately, the North American and European humane

communities of the early to mid-20th century were too overwhelmed to

do much more for displaced equines than to document what happened.

Using fewer working equines will prevent animal suffering in

the long run, as many millions of sentient creatures are replaced by

machines. During the transition, unfortunately, more horses,

donkeys, and mules are likely to be abandoned, abused, neglected,

and trucked to slaughter under horrific conditions. Foals will have

declining value, so will be increasingly mistreated or just killed

as surplus.

The working conditions for equines still in service will

become ever harsher, as more roads are paved, more motor vehicles

spew hot exhaust into the animals' faces, watering troughs are

removed from crossroads as obstacles to speeding cars and trucks,

and the remaining equine users--usually the poorest of the

poor--overload and overdrive the animals more, in a losing struggle

to economically compete with mechanized transport.

As equine use decreases, accidents involving equines

increase. Motorists typically do not understand animals' needs and

abilities, and kill and injure many in collisions.

Stones flung up by speeding tires often blind working

equines--a problem that was little known before animals shared the

roads with cars, but is now endemic to the lives of working animals

the world over.

Equines tend to get used to the passage of motor vehicles

relatively easily, but only by overcoming their instinct to bolt at

the rapid approach of something large approaching from behind. Those

who spook are among the first culled as team owners downsize.

Not to be overlooked is the pass-down factor, frequently

noted by early 20th century U.S. humane commentators. The most

affluent people in a community get motor vehicles first. They then

sell or give away their working animals to people who formerly could

not afford them. Inevitably the transition to motor power includes a

transition from teamstering being a well-paid and respected

profession to being an occupation of the underclass.

The last operators of horse-drawn vehicles selling

vegetables and dairy products in U.S. cities, the last Romanian

gypsies collecting scrap in horse-drawn wagons, and operators of

carriage and pony rides are often seen as survivors of long

traditions of an equine-centered life-style. Many actually have

little background in animal care, and are heirs to work abandoned by

the families who formerly did those jobs, back when the work was

much more lucrative. Thus animal care degenerates at the same time

that the working conditions for animals deteriorate.

 

Last ride

 

The last and most brutal part of the phase-out of working

equines is that tens of thousands are transported to slaughter in

unsuitable vehicles, often for huge distances, since equine

slaughterhouses and consumers of horse meat are relatively few in all

parts of the world.

Often the drovers hauling the horses have little if any

awareness that horses have higher centers of gravity than cattle and

pigs, so fall much more often if the vehicles suddenly slow or turn;

that horses need to stand upright, not ride in double-decked

vehicles that force their heads down into unnatural postures; and

that horses should ride facing backward, not forward, to avoid

injuries both in transport and in unloading.

Horses suffer from the same neglect and mistreatment that

afflicts all livestock in transport. Then the killing may be done

at facilities unsuited to horses, by personnel using antiquated

methods, recently documented in undercover videos of horse slaughter

in Mexico and eastern Europe.

Most of the largest, most populous nations in Asia, Africa,

and Latin America, with the greatest numbers of working equines,

are now either at or fast approaching phase-out. This occurs in two

stages. The first is when equine use rapidly declines relative to

human population. The actual numbers of working horses, donkeys,

and mules may level off, or even modestly increase, but as ever

greater shares of the workload are done by motor vehicles, both the

economic and physical environments become less conducive to

continuing to use equines.

The second phase is a steep drop in the actual numbers of

equines. Societies relying on equines for farm work and transport

usually sustain equine slaughter industries, to dispose of animals

who are too old, ill, or badly injured to be economically

productive. During the end phase of equine use, fewer equines fit

those definitions, but users and former users begin selling healthy

animals to slaughter, until the equine use industries contract to

little more than recreational use.

Then, as societies become more affluent, more horses may be

raised for riding and racing, as in the U.S., which had only 2.4

million horses in 1961, when farm and transport use had effectively

ended, but now has about 9.2 million.

1961 was the first year for which the United Nations Food and

Agricultural Organization assembled statistics on agricultural animal

populations worldwide. The numbers for the most populous nations

that have cooperated with the FAO effort from the beginning show the

trend since then, as well as the magnitude of the challenge ahead:

 

Nation Million equines Equines/humans

1961 2008 1961 2008

Brazil 5.5 5.9 1/14 1/33

China 14.1 15.1 1/44 1/83

Egypt 15.3 3.1 1/ 2 1/21

India 2.4 1.4 1/18 1/82

Mexico 7.0 9.6 1/ 5 1/12

Pakistan 1.0 4.3 1/47 1/40

 

The Brazilian, Chinese, and Mexican equine populations have

all slightly increased, but have declined by half relative to the

workload needed to sustain their respective societies. The Egyptian

equine population, 97% of them donkeys, has fallen from the largest

on record anywhere to a normal level for an agrarian society in the

developing world. Only Pakistan relies more on equine labor today

than 48 years ago.

The fourfold increase in the number of working equines in

Pakistan may reflect a decrease in the use of bullock carts, long

the primary mode of transport throughout the Indian subcontinent.

Bullocks were abundant because the dominant Hindu culture inhibited

slaughtering healthy bovines for meat, and to this day do much of

the work done elsewhere by horses, mules, and donkeys.

Pakistan, mostly Muslim, separated from India in 1947.

Cattle slaughter has increased in Pakistan ever since, while bullock

carts have nearly disappeared.

Mumbai U.S. consul Henry D. Baker reported in 1914 that motor

vehicles already appeared to be replacing bullock carts in urban

India, but lack of domestic oil reserves and lack of foreign

exchange inhibited the transition for another 80 years, until India

became a global hub of electronic communication.

Since then, Indian use of motor vehicles has increased at

the rate of 20% per year, use of equines and bullock carts has

plummeted, and what to do with surplus male calves has become one of

India's most vexing and politicially charged problems. Indian milk

production is comparable to that of the U.S., but milk yield per cow

is so much less that Indian cattle birth as many as 10 surplus bull

calves for every one born in the U.S.

All of the same issues associated with the transition from

equine use to use of motor vehicles are involved in the transition

from using bullock carts. The economic and cultural issues differ,

however, since horses, donkeys and mules have little religious

significance in most of the world, and are deliberately produced for

work, whereas bullocks are a byproduct of milk production plus

cultural resistance to slaughter.

Rural regions of eastern Europe still relied heavily on

horses for farm work and transport until after the collapse of

Communism in the early 1990s. Cruelty in the export of horses to

slaughter subsequently became an internationally publicized scandal

in nation after nation, moving from those closest to horsemeat

consumers in Belgium, France, and Italy to those farther away.

Most of eastern Europe is now close to completing the

replacement of working equines with motor vehicles, as the numbers

from Poland most clearly show:

 

Nation Million equines Equines/humans

1961 2008 1961 2008

Poland 2.7 0.3 1/11 1/130

Romania 1.0 0.8 1/19 1/28

Ukraine 1.0 0.6 1/43 1/77

 

The transition in Romania has gathered momentum since Romania

was admitted to the European Union in January 2007.

Gandhian economists, in particular, have predicted for

decades that eventually declining global oil reserves will force a

return to greater use of animal power, but even where the actual

numbers of equines are still about what they were in 1961, breeding

enough to re-establish the ratios necessary to provide for the

present human population would take many years.

Producing an adequate fodder supply to sustain a return to

animal power would be harder still. Most fodder crops can also be

used to feed humans, to feed animals raised for meat, or to

manufacture biofuels, and these uses are all considerably more

lucrative. As gasoline prices soared in 2008, the cost of feeding a

donkey became higher per mile traveled in most of the developing

world than the cost of fueling a motorcycle--especially if the

motorcycle ran on ethanol.

Such ratios wobble with the world economy. Replacing equines

with motor vehicles is likely to progress much more rapidly in some

nations than others, and may still take decades in the poorest parts

of Africa and Latin America. But easing the lives of equines in the

nations where the transition is coming fastest is challenge enough.

ANIMAL PEOPLE president Kim Bartlett has initiated three

projects working toward that end in the past three years.

The first ANIMAL PEOPLE equine aid project, begun in January

2007, is a mobile clinic serving the donkeys and horses who toil

along the highway between Delhi and Agra, India. The clinic is

staffed and operated by Friendicoes SECA.

The second project, begun in September 2008, enables Jakarta

Animal Aid to treat carriage horses and teach their drivers proper

equine care.

The third project, begun in January 2009, is relief outreach

meant to assist all of the animals who were isolated by warfare in

Gaza, carried out by the Palestine Wildlife Society and Let The

Animals Live, of Israel. In practice, the program has mainly

helped horses and donkeys.

ANIMAL PEOPLE also funds the salary of African Network for

Animal Welfare founder Josphat Ngonyo. Ngonyo's work in recent years

has included coordinating a vaccination drive to stop an unusual

rabies outbreak among donkeys in the Kenyan crossroads city of

Isiolo, and treating and feeding the donkeys and other animals who

were displaced by deadly rioting in several parts of Kenya during

January 2008.

 

 

--

Merritt Clifton

Editor, ANIMAL PEOPLE

P.O. Box 960

Clinton, WA 98236

 

Telephone: 360-579-2505

Fax: 360-579-2575

E-mail: anmlpepl

Web: www.animalpeoplenews.org

 

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