CRUELTY TO ANIMALS.

Temuka Leader, Issue 2000, 28 January 1890, Page 3

CRUELTY TO ANIMALS.

[Communicated. ] Wo have no sympathy with the brutality of working horses with raw sores on their shoulders, but when we hear ofhuman beings, sick unto death, being turned away from the door of hospital because they have not complied with some inhuman rule, and the agony of death embittered with no Jaw to interfere with such cases, and next day when we see a policeman stop a teamster on the road, or at the plough, to examine his horses, and when any sores are found to have the teamster or ploughman severely punished, we are inclined to think that there is a goody-goodiness in such humane care for horses by people who are so tolerant of man’s inhumanity to man. We by no means sympathise with the cruel treatment of beasts, and it might be worth while to enquire into what is the cause of those cases of cruelty to horses that come so often before our courts, and whether the present system of coping with the evil is likely to eradicate it. We sometimes think there is more cruelty in the punishment: that the punishment is in a moral sense more criminal than the crime it is ostensibly intended to put down. We don’t think that working witk horses has a tendency to blunt the feelings and brutalise the nature of man; we rather think that contact with that noble, docile, and faithful animal would tend to refine the feelings and nature, if not brutalised by some other cause. We think the real cause of this evil, and of almost every evil, is to be found in the laissez faire policy of our rulers and law-makers—a policy that has led to such cruel competition among the toiling millions. We have known a contract ploughman for working on an average fifteen hours a day for eight months with four horses, after paying camp expenses, have the handsome sum of ten pounds to support his family and pay for wear and tear of plant. We know an instance of one of ’these men for working his horses with sore shoulders being mulcted in fines and costs that amounted to more than his net earnings in three years. Let anyone think of the suffering from privation that man’s wife and children—who were certainly innocent of blame—had to endure, and it will be understood what we mean when we say that the punishment is more criminal than the crime. We have no sympathy with cruelty to animals, but we don’t forget that our fellow-creatures of human kind have feelings as well as horses, and our imagination is sufficiently strong to enable us to conceive that the pangs of hunger are cruel to bear. We have seen a new chum, who had never been used to pick-and-shovel work previous to coming to New Zealand, with his hands as raw as we have seen a horse’s shoulder, and glad to put up with the pain in his hands to get food for himself and family. That new chum was on a par with the young horse being broken to harness—yet no one was punished for cruelty to him, although he was goaded by circumstances, the same as horses are. While the conditions that goad men and horses are perpetuated the evils that flow from such conditions will remain. They cannot be remedied by fines or imprisonment, or any form of refined cruelty. The culpable neglect of duty of rulers and lawmakers is the real cause of the wrong. To allow conditions to exist that compel men to drive more than two days’ work out of horses in a day for a bare subsistence, and punish them for cruelty, is simply ridiculous, monstrous ! Over-working is undoubtedly the cause of nine-tenths of the raw sores on horses’ shoulders. The only practical way of sympathising with them is to enact laws that will prevent them from being over-driven and limit their hours of labor, and by so doing you will give their drivers leisure for mental improvement, which leads to refinement of feeling which abolishes cruelty.