the present instance upon neutral ground, and so talk to both sides. Those who are against it can find no excuse for docking the tails of horses, which custom cannot be considered other than vivisection; whilst those who argue that science can be advanced by investigating the interior organs of a guinea-pig, cannot argue that docking a horse’s tail proves anything more than that we are still little more than half-reclaimed savages, with a remnant of idolatry which obliges us to offer up as sacrifice the ends of our horses’ vertebral columns to that idol which we worship under the name of ‘fashion.’ The whole system is rotten.
To drive a horse that cuts himself is cruelty to animals, and at some future time it will be punished as such. To rasp away, and thus weaken, the inside of the shell of the foot, in a futile endeavour to avoid cutting, is also cruelty, and some day this practice will also be prohibited on that account. The prevailing idea of cruelty seems to be that blood must be flowing, or sores visible under the harness; but a sore that gets hit with the foot is quite as bad.
The operation of rasping away the hoof, to cure cutting, is as unscientific as it is unsuccessful. The idea that suggests it is one of those that ‘Impecuniosus’ says ‘has sprung from wrong roots altogether.’ He cured his horses of this misfortune by shoeing them with Charlier tips. The cause of cutting is the shoeing. It is not meant by this that it is the shoe or nails that cut—as anyone may see
