The US House Appropriations Committee has just voted to lift the ban on funding for federal inspections for horse slaughter, thus potentially paving the way for new US equine abattoirs to open up. I wrote extensively about the history of horsemeat in the USA in The Age of the Horse in order to try to …
Continue reading “No, Horse Slaughter Won’t Solve the US Welfare Problem – Here’s Why”
I’ve written something for The Atlantic‘s Object Lessons blog on the long (if potted!) history of horsemeat in America. A much fuller account is on offer in The Age of the Horse! During World War II food shortages, horse meat once again found its way to American tables, but the post-war backlash was rapid. “Horse …
Continue reading “From Taboo to “Ecoterrorism” – Horsemeat’s Troubled Political History in America”
Lucy Rees’ theories on the equine mind completed the jigsaw I was struggling to put together in The Age of the Horse. They are so down to earth and commonsense that it is hard to remember how one might ever have imagined horses living and interacting according to another, more human logic. I’m really delighted …
The Brethren of Purity were a secret group of Islamic philosophers based in Basra, Iraq sometime during the eighth or tenth centuries. So secretive were they that very little is known about them, but some of their writing survives, including a letter known as The Case of the Animals Versus Man Before the King of …
Continue reading “The Mule – and his Friends – Put Man on Trial”
Wilhelm von Osten was born into the German squirearchy in 1838 and went on to work as a maths teacher. He moved to the eastern Berlin district of Prenzlauer Berg in 1866 and purchased a house at 10 Griebenowstraße. A befitted his background, he was a keen rider and huntsman with an appreciation of horses. …
Continue reading “Clever Hans: A Horse, a House and a Little History”
Those working horses were saints.
I thought it would be interesting to compile the horse welfare promises of this year’s US presidential candidate promises. Which platform is best for your horse? Hillary Clinton, Democrats “As president, Hillary will … Protect horses by ending the slaughter of horses for human consumption and cracking down on the practice of horse soring, in …
Continue reading “Trump, Stein or Clinton? How Would Your Horse Vote in 2016?”
In his 29-year career as a policeman in Victorian London, John Pegg oversaw over 1,300 convictions for cruelty to horses. This poem was written “on behalf” of those horses by George H Hutt in 1892. Read more about Hutt – “the police poet” – and Pegg here, along with a collection of other “horses’ …
Continue reading “Talking Horses: Honhy, Honhy, Hon! A Victorian Policeman is Saluted.”
“You are doing a man’s work and so you’re dressed rather like a man, but remember just because you wear a smock and breeches you should take care to behave like a British girl who expects chivalry and respect from everyone she meets. … See to it that [a Land Army Girl] means … a …
Thank you to Jane Badger for this video of a speaker at the World Horse Welfare Conference, 2012. John Grant was raised as a traveller and now works as an RSPCA inspector. He talks about traveller culture and horses, from pride to fly grazing.
