VICIOUSNESS. AGGRESSIVE VICE.
Subject maliciously using its natural weapons. Horse kicks, bites, crowds against wall, rears, bucks, plunges, treads upon. Cattle use horns or forehead, or kick. Dog bites. Cats scratch and bite. Ticklishness different. Developed or inherited. Revenge. Desperation in pain. Sexual. A psychosis. Responsibility of owner, in selling, toward employe, in exposing in a public place. Treatment: remove source of suffering, treat kindly, secure confidence, castrate, place under absolute constraint, throw a la Rarey, Comanche bridle, tie head to tail and circle, etc.
This word is employed to cover only those forms of vice in which the animal shows a malignant disposition to attack or injure man or beast. Each animal uses its natural weapons according to the occasion.
The horse strikes with his fore feet, kicks with his hind, bites, crowds his rider’s leg against a wall, or his attendant’s body against the side of the stall, rears, bucks, plunges, or treads his victim under his feet.
The ruminants, large and small, use their horns, and cattle their feet as well. In the absence of horns they still use the forehead, but much less effectively and usually only with the purpose of defence.
The dog attacks with his teeth and the cat with her claws by preference, and uses the teeth as a secondary weapon.
Swine use their tusks to rip or disembowel their adversary or victim.
A very ticklish horse cannot bear to be touched on the flank or hind parts, without throwing the ear backward, glancing back, showing the white of the eye, and lifting the foot. But if this is mere excess of sensitiveness and begets no disposition to kick it is not viciousness.
The vicious horse will in such cases bite or kick repeatedly and with well directed purpose. He will moreover show the movements of ears and eyes and attack his victim in the absence of any such excuse, the simple approach being a sufficient occasion. He will bite and strike with the fore feet at the same time, or he may strike out with one hind foot or with both at once. He may attack indiscriminately all who approach him, or reserve his ill-will for particular individuals, and then he often acts under a feeling of revenge for ill-usage from this individual or some one he conceives him to represent.
In some cases viciousness is inherited and certain families have a bad reputation in this respect. It may be either a survival of the ancestral disposition of the wild horse, or it may be a trait developed by ill-usage of a team of more immediate ancestors.
In other cases the habit is acquired by the individual himself, and in such cases it may be due to brutal treatment at the hands of man; to a continuous punishment of a high-spirited horse leading to resentment and retaliation; to acute pain in boils, abrasions or other sores in the root of the mane, or the shoulder, or the back, where pressed on by the collar or saddle; or to the generative excitement of mares in heat. In many such cases the vice lasts only during the persistence of the cause, in others it becomes permanent. The stallion is much more disposed to aggressive vice than the gelding.
Whether we may consider the vice a disease or not, it becomes a habit engrained in the nature, the nerve centres tending to reproduce their habitual acts indefinitely, so that we may look on the condition as a psychosis which is too often incurable.
Responsibility of the owner. Dangerous aggressive vice is too self-evident to the buyer to constitute a good cause for annulling a sale, but it has this legal bearing, that the owner who keeps an animal known to be vicious, renders himself responsible for whatever injury to man or beast he may perpetrate. Thus the vicious stallion, bull or dog in a public place which damages person or property, renders his owner liable to the extent of such damages. This, of course, must be largely qualified by the attendant circumstances. The man employed to take care of a horse, knows his habits as fully as the owner, takes his chances and should exercise due precautions to avoid danger. The person who enters a stall carelessly without speaking to the horse, seeing that he stands over, or otherwise responds to his call, is himself to blame if he gets kicked. The attendant who does things to a dangerous or questionable horse for mere bravado cannot blame the owner if he gets himself injured. If a person teases a horse so as to tempt him to retaliate, not only is he responsible for his own consequent injuries, but largely also for the habits of the horse and for such injuries as others may subsequently sustain from him.
A dog or a bull shown in a public place, and which breaks loose and injures spectators or others, manifestly renders his master responsible for all such damage.
Treatment of aggressive vice. In mild dispositions in which the vice is roused by temporary suffering, it may often be cured by removal of the cause of such suffering. Indeed, without the healing of sores under the collar or saddle the vice cannot be arrested. Considerate and gentle treatment, too, will go far to restore confidence and to gradually do away with the aggressive disposition.
In wicked stallions castration will usually restore to a good measure of docility. The exceptional cases appear to be those that are hereditarily and constitutionally vicious, or in which the habit has been thoroughly developed and firmly fixed by long practice.
Mares, too, which become vicious and dangerous at each recurrence of œstrum, can usually be completely cured by the removal of the ovaries especially if this is done early in the disease.
The inveterate cases may usually be subdued and rendered controllable for a time by one of the methods of subjugation employed by the professional tamers, but unless they are thereafter kept in good hands they are liable to relapse into the old habit. Among the more effective methods are the Rarey mode of throwing which may be repeated again and again until the animal is thoroughly impressed with a sense of the domination of man and the futility of resistance; the resort of tying the head and tail closely together and letting the animal weary and daze himself by turning in a circle, first to the one side and then to the other; the application of the Comanche bridle made of a small rope, one loop of which is passed through the mouth and back of the ears and drawn tightly, then another loop is made to encircle the lower jaw, and the chin is drawn in against the trachea by passing the free end of the rope round the upper part of the neck and again through the loop encircling the lower jaw and drawing it tight; or a similar small rope is passed a number of times through the mouth and back of the ears and drawn tightly so as to compress the medulla and stupify the animal. This is supposed to be rendered more effective by passing one turn each between the upper lip and gums and between the lower lip and the gums.