Humanitarian Work Among the Horses

Sun (Auckland), Volume 1, Issue 186, 27 October 1927, Page 7

Humanitarian Work Among the Horses

THE DUCHESS AND THE DONKEY (Written for THE SUN.) The new Auckland railway, which may spell much progress will, among other things, carry its desecrating steel j rails and screaming engines through a j portion of the famous old stud farm j known as Sylvia Park. Here, out of funny little foal’s eyes, the great Carbine first blinked at the world’s sunshine; and here, under the shadows cast by friendly trees, his sire Musket lies in the slumber that will never be broken by blatant trains. Thus does the present trample on the past, till bright fact becomes pale legend for mortal man or mortal horses. Perhaps because I am an incurable sentimentalist where the latter are concerned, I could not help being comforted by the knowledge that the circumstance of the screeching engine was regretted by many of our sporting writers. With sympathetic and entertaining reminiscence these have lately taken us back to the days when men passed more leisurely through the pother that we call life, and found, in their unhurried progress, more time for a more gracious and more contemplative outlook than the one we are less and less likely to acquire. In reading one of these articles a short time ago, a reference to Carbine and to that great sportsman, the Duke of Portland, who acquired him from Australia, I was reminded of a queer little incident upon which I happened once in London. Some English relatives, immersed in a quiet sort of wealth, and for whom the gay tumult of a London “season” had become effete and meaningless, lent us their flat in Piccadilly for the months of May and June.

THE NOBLE ASS At first it seemed just a little fantastic to be pursuing an ordinary existence in the immediate propinquity of so much throbbing and delightful turbulence; it seemed almost indecorous to be eating and sleeping in rooms whose windows looked out upon the broad sweep of London’s most thronged thoroughfare. But the windows themselves had something of the quality of magic casements. Below them, ceaseless as a river, the unending traffic rolled past; and it was here, looking out one morning, that I saw a strange thing .caught in the up-stream tide. Among the crush of swaying, scarlet buses, swiftly darting taxicabs, rumbling vans of commerce, and the frailer craft of pleasure came a little, mousecoloured, piaffering donkey. Pulling a small, heavily-laden cart, he looked like a straw tossing upon a swollen torrent. He was tiny and very weak: his legs were unsteady for his load almost anchored him while the unrelenting traffic swept him on. If there is a special God to whom little suffering donkeys may pray, perhaps he was asking for a miracle to happen, for the end of physical endurance was just about reached, and when that happened—well, when that happened, what would the human game be? He had no reason t 0 think very highly of the human game, anyhow. It was at just about this point in what one may presume were his meditations that a jam in the traffic brought everything to a sandstill, and the little donkey found himself crushed against the kerb, standing—thus is prayer is sometimes answered —beside a most exquisite lady. I happened to know that it was the Duchess of Portland at whose feet the Donkey God (who may be our God too) had thrown this pitiful piece of debris; and being aware of her mank works of humanity. I was not surprised to see her stop and look with infinite pity at the pathetic, tremblinglegged creature beside her. Nor did it seem odd when she put a slender, gloved hand on his head, and bent down to speak to him. What she said I of course could not hear; but I knew it was something kid and not improbably foolish—the sort of thing only a wise and understanding person would say, and only a little brokendown ass would understand.

ONLY THE FIRST ACT The mysterious word of sympathy was, however, only the beginning, not the end of the episode. Presently a bit °f London’s splendid humane machinery was put into action. The donkey was led down a side street and divested of his insignia of toil. An incredibly short time afterwards a well-padded ambulance came and rumbled him away, quietly, through the rolling traffic, and the little drama ended, so far as my window was concerned. A short time afterwards I received an invitation to a garden party, perhaps a unique one, for it was held at a Home of Rest for horses, in a suburb of London. At this fuction, where were entertained many overseas guests who were interested in humane work, I was once again to see the gracious person who had befriended the forlorn little ass of Piccadilly. It was a curious coincidence, and for those who expect sequence in a narrative I can truthfully assert that I also met, more or less at the same party, the subject of this anecdote. Standing in a huge loose-box among billows of golden straw, his velvety eyes blinking softly from their surrounding fuzz of greyish hair, he still seemed to be pondering,

even in the midst of superlative com- ■ fort, the ancient wrongs of his race— ; for no donkey has ever been known to j fly, even briefly, a tiny banner cf hope- ; HORSE HOSPITAL Now the Cricklewood Home for sick . and toil-worn horses, of which this i somewhat unhopeful hero was for the : meanwhile a fortunate inmate, is part of an old farm, and lies within easy reach of the centre of London. Its president is the Luke of Portland, who has always taken the most active interest in this institution for the amelioration of equine distress and suffering. Of course, nobody is at all elated, these days, over the fact that a i man happens to be a duke, and I suppose I am as steeped in the modern i indifference to rank as the next one. ! But for some reason I was strangely ' impressed by the fact of a great sportsman being also a great humanitarian. In this part of the world we are too accustomed to see the exploitation of horseflesh for purely commercial ends. We are too used to the wastage that goes on in the sport we all find so enthralling; too foolish to see that the exercise of a little sentiment toward the poor creatures we so lightly cast aside, would, in the. long run—what’s the horrible word —pay! To me, then, because of these things, there was something rather touching in the thought that a man who has owned some of the finest horses that ever brought fame to the English turf could yet find a place in his heart for the less fortunate slaves of man that had fallen by the roadside, and who could find time in a busy life for practical demonstration of his compassion and kindliness. It must be so easy to make one’s philanthropies mere delegations when one is a duke or a duke’s lady. There was no particular reason, you may think, for the Duchess of Portland to make some soft and foolish remarks to a tumbledown donkey in the middle of Piccadilly. Yet there must have come to her, from this spontaneous gesture, a satisfaction that could never have followed the casual signing of a cheque, or the impersonal endowment of an institution. There is surely an aristocracy of the feelings as well as of the lineage we affect, in these queer days, to despise; the ascendancy of kind hearts over coronets may be admitted even by those who seem to think that a duke is something that might as well be shot.

CHANCE FOR SPORTSMEN The method of running the Cricklewood Home is very simple. A yearly subscription of a guinea entitles the donor to send any sick or overworked horse to the homo for treatment or for a well-deserved rest, a sound animal being substituted, without charge, for its owner’s use in the meantime. Except in the case of old favourites, who have Ijeen sent to end their days peacefully at the farm, the horse and donkey inmates are, in practically every case, animals whose owners could themselves never afford to pay for skilled veterinary advice and treatment. Thus the philanthropy fulfils a dual benevolent purpose. Many of the are endowed for all time; some have been given as memorials to human dear ones who in this life loved the gay rattle of little hoofs and the soft eyes of horses. On the day that I was there, a sleek chestnut head leaned over the halfdoor of one of these havens for the weary—an old, tired horse drowsing happily in the pale English sunshine. Above it a brass plate bore the simple inscription, “In Memory of Lucy.” There are so many memorials that are senseless; many of man’s gestures of sorrow are- There are memorials that are meant for crowds —these take no great hold of the imagination. But there are three that for widely different reasons stand out in my own memory. There is Dean Swift’s tomb in the Dublin Cathedral, with its defiant epitaph, written by himself. There is the irony of the lighted taper, never allowed to go out, that since her canonisation burns to the memory of Joan of Arc in Notre Dame, and there is the so peaceful, so merciful one to the Lucy who pitied horses. A. GLADYS KERNOT. Auckland.