FIENDISH CRUELTY.

Wairarapa Age, Volume XXX, Issue 8987, 23 November 1907, Page 3

FIENDISH CRUELTY.

POOR PARIS CAB HORSES

Mario Lutgen, formerly Countess du Fin de la Gueriniere, now a licenced cab-driver, tells horrible tales of cruelty to Paris cab-horses. According to her, owners deliberately use up their animals in a few months, rather than keep them going for years by proper care, because they find the'former course cheaper. The animals are rarely given enough when he drops dead, to buy another. The food is not only insufficient, but bad. A Paris cab horse hardly ever tastes hay or oats, but is just kept alive on rice, maize, potatoes, bran, and barley, and even then never enough. The cabwoman cites the" case of a horse which dropped down exhausted near the Saint Lazare Station. The driver, as usual began to beat it, but it could not move. A crowd collected and apostrophised the cabman. A sansibls bystander did the practical thing, and went to fetch a pail of oats. The horse devoured them then got up of itfeown accord, and trotted off. It had sunk down solely frotn inanition. All decent cabmen, says the cab lady, have to buy about half a bushel- of oats daily out of their own pockets for their underfed horses. She vouches for an almost incredible atory of cruelty, practised for years in the largest hackney cab stables of Paris. A wretched animal was kept to be experimented upon with different foods, or so-called foods. It was harnessed like a horse turning a merry-go-round. New sorts of "fodder," such as pounded wood shavings, were given to the longsuffering beast, and it was kept going round and round to see how much work it could do on how little of the stuff. The rations were gradually reduced in order to find out the minimum limit to which horses could be usefully starved. The cab-lady says the wretched animal was thus experimented on for its entire existence, and was well-known to the company's drivers, who called it the "chairman's hobby horse." She tells other diabolical stories of cabmen keeping iron-tipped sticks wherewith to prod their worn-out beasts, and driving wounded horses day after day purposely whipping them on their sores. If such fiendish cruelty a?, this is practised, even by half-a-dozen cabmen, the only thing will be to give up cabs altogether. .Everyone has nitiud Paris horses, half of them lean, weary, heart-broken jades, which when they are down wish only to die. The cab.vomen's conclusion is that the unfortunate Paris horse will have a better chance of a decent existence with a cab-woman than with a cabman.