An Irish Draught called Rupert performs on stage at the Royal Opera House in London (simplymarvelous) Elizabeth I’s sidesaddle came up for auction in England. (Sidesaddle Girl) A British farmer working a 265-acre farm with a team of Percherons (simplymarvelous) Facebook is hot on the heels of a self-styled record breaker in the US who …
Tag Archives: working horses
Neglect and the Manhattan Carriage Horse
This week a horse that pulled tourist carriages in New York dropped dead in the middle of Manhattan, provoking cries of cruelty and mistreatment. I’m aware that there’s a long-standing campaign to end the practice of using these horses in the city, and that the only other equines in central New York, at the Claremont …
Horse Power Boats
In mid-nineteenth century America, horses walked on water, or, more precisely, on treadmills and around capstans which turned the paddle wheels of ferries. The only surviving example of one of these “team boats” was discovered in Lake Champlain in New York in 1983. Read about it in a Chronicle of the Horse article by Sid …
Heavy Horse Week: Cart Horses in Bloom
The Liverpool tradition of May Day parades began in the 1850s when drivers of working horses and their families took to the streets in holiday spirit. By the 1880s the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals and various promoters of heavy horse breeds had turned the parades into not only a free show …
Heavy Horses: Peak Oil
The 1960s and 1970s saw a surge of interest in heavy horse breeds just as the animals were vanishing on British farmland, replaced by the tractor and the truck. People began to start working with horses again, keen to “preserve the old ways”, and heavy horse visitor centres sprung up where tourists and locals could …
Who’s Afraid, Virginia?
Virginia Woolf in her diary, on seeing a dead horse in London: “to die in Oxford Street one hot afternoon, & to have been only a van horse.”