The Eighty-Dollar Champion - Elizabeth Letts [14]
With good care, a modern pleasure horse can often be ridden well into his twenties, and often lives to thirty or forty years old. But this was not true in the era when horses were used as beasts of burden. The traditional American workhorse’s useful life was short—averaging five years, from ages five to ten. Up until age five, a horse was fed and nurtured for the prospect of sale. After age ten, its career was finished. Once it could no longer work it was put up for sale or destroyed.
A commodity, bred for its economic usefulness, the horse used to be considered a “living machine” rather than a sentient being. As the horse illustrator C. W. Anderson once said, “Many people have sighed for the ‘good old days’ and regretted the ‘passing of the horse,’ but today, when only those who like horses own them, it is a far better time for horses.” When horses were seen as primarily a means of locomotion, little sentimentality was attached to them. A horse that could no longer work was a horse that could be—and usually was—discarded.
A variety of ailments could cause that day to come sooner; the most common was lameness, followed by equine infectious diseases and accidents. Horses collided with other horse-drawn conveyances and with motor vehicles; they slipped on ice; they spooked and shied and ran away, entangling themselves in their harnesses, farm equipment, or the horses with which they were yoked together.
Horses were generally sold in teams. Most people preferred horses of the same color, wrongly believing that color reflected a level of underlying similarity. A team also needed to be matched in size, strength, and temperament. As herd animals, horses developed strong preferences. Used to being hitched with a stablemate, a horse might become balky or nervous if asked to go out with an unfamiliar partner. Any horse that was part of a team would lose most of its value if something happened to the teammate. But every horse, even a dead horse, had value.
In the nineteenth century, when a horse died on the street it was simply left where it fell until an enterprising butcher came to cart the carcass away. Photographs of urban street scenes from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries show children playing in the street, seemingly oblivious to the nearby hulk of a dead horse.
Horses that did not die in the street were normally euthanized. The rendering plant was a necessary and economically vital part of the horse economy. Horses that were sick, lame, or just too old to work were shipped to the cannery, where they were killed with a bullet or a captive bolt to the head. In a midcentury veterinary manual, above the matter-of-fact caption “Where to shoot a horse,” a photograph shows a horse with a white mark on his forehead, indicating the best spot to place the gun. After death, the carcasses of horses were rendered. Due to cultural preferences, horsemeat was not typically consumed in the United States, although during World War II there was an attempt to promote horsemeat consumption to help alleviate wartime shortages of beef. A graphic picture from Life magazine in 1943 showed horse carcasses hanging on hooks as butchers stripped their hides; on a facing page, smiling customers purchased government-inspected horsemeat from a butcher shop disconcertingly named the Man o’ War. More often, horsemeat was marked with charcoal to tag it as dog food, so that unscrupulous butchers would not try to pass it off as beef. Every part of the horse was used: the horse’s long tail hair was prized for violin bows, and the bones and hooves were boiled down and turned into glue.
Before the advent of the internal combustion engine, the horse was an essential helpmate, pressed into service to clear and till the fields, fight