Animals: Rescued Heroes

Many a lean British Cavalry officer lolling in his Pall Mall or Piccadilly Club, many a ruddy, fox-hunting squire taking a pull at the Tuke Holdsworth 1908, exploded apoplectically last week as they thumbed through the Illustrated London News. What pulled them up snorting was a series of pictures of old, crippled, starved horses almost too decrepit to stand, all of whom had done gallant War-time service. Most pitiable were two photographs of a famished, broken-kneed old black mare which had once seen proud service with the nth Hussars, a bay cavalry gelding with “all his joints gone and very lame in the near-fore and near-hind.” They were two survivors of 80,000 British Army horses and mules sold by the British Government to Belgium in 1919, put to work in mines, hitched to produce-wagons and canal-barges. Coming on these pictures most Britons were more convinced than ever that “no damned Froggie knows how to treat a horse.”

Year ago Britain’s Our Dumb Friends’ League—a be-kind-to-animals organization founded in 1897 and supported by voluntary contributions—launched a campaign to rescue from the Continent any of these horses that had survived. The league had little difficulty in tracing them because each bears an identifiable Army mark. Moreover a noted Belgian animal lover, the Dowager Duchess De Croy, provided the league with a list of all the old horses in Belgium. Whenever the League finds a British Warhorse and has enough money on hand, they buy it for about $100, take it to the League’s stables in. Brussels, put the horse to grass for perhaps the first time in 18 years, later send it to Britain to be “pensioned off” in some country paddock.

By last week 25 had been rescued out of an estimated 600 survivors throughout France & Belgium. Many of the 25 were blind, many carried scars of the battlefield, all were in miserable shape. Long-starved, the horses had to be prevented from disastrous overeating, were kept down to a daily seven pounds of hay, a weekly gallon of beer. Most gratifying to the League officers was the rapid way in which the horses recalled their English. After only a few weeks with British grooms, the horses would be obeying orders they had not heard since the War.