This is the most loathsome disease to which the horse is subject. It is provoked by stimulating food combined with exhausting labor. It was formerly very common in posting stables; long stage teams were seldom free from it. The London omnibuses, by night, are said to drive glandered horses, and the proprietors of those vehicles are reported to keep glandered stables.
In all of such cases the food is of the best and most stimulating description—twenty pounds of oats and beans with five pounds of hay, per day, are needed to keep a glandered horse in working condition. Gentlemen formerly used to fee the post-boy to "push along." We well remember the quivering forms of gasping flesh which were unharnessed whenever the old coach changed horses.
Omnibuses are very heavy; the constant stoppages make the draught still more severe. The animals which appear in front of these vehicles are small in size, rarely sixteen hands high, but the best and strongest their proprietors can afford. A little breed is desirable, as a coarse horse would lack the courage to take the collar and to persevere. The age of these horses is generally three years when first bought in. Some animals have worked through many seasons, but such instances are exceptions. Numbers annually yield to the drag upon the constitution. These are sold for what they will fetch. But several, either from weakness or some other cause which our science yet lacks perception to discover, annually become glandered.
Youth and high feeding, conjoined with excessive labor and damp lodging, will certainly produce glanders. Age, starvation, and ceaseless toil generally induce farcy. The glanders and the farcy, however, are one and the same disease, modified by the cause which originates them. Glanders is the more vigorous form of the disorder; farcy is the slow type, fastening upon general debility.
These disorders have been the scourges of horse-flesh. They still are the inheritance which man's willing slave gains by service to a harsh and cruel master. Men, to their fellow-men, sometimes confess, without any sense of shame, that they buy cheap horses to work them up. It is, in some cases, esteemed more economical to exhaust the life than to purchase and to maintain that number of animals which would be equal to the labor. This horrible system is in daily operation in a country professing Christianity!
Glanders is provoked by human depravity. Had people common feeling for the life over which they are given authority—would they only admit, in its largeness and its truth, that "the laborer is worthy of his hire"—the disease might, in one year, become a tradition.
At present the affection exists as the dread of every horse proprietor. It is highly contagious—all owners of horses know this. The stable may be scrupulously clean, yet the poison may have been lodged there by the last inhabitant. It is not only contagious to horses, but it is equally dangerous to men. Three sad instances of this fact have come to the author's knowledge. Two respectable gentlemen, moving in good society, were each contaminated, and both pitiably perished of this terrible disease. They were no stable-helpers, moving and living among suspicious beasts, but individuals whose avocations did not oblige them to mix with horses—gentlemen of professional standing, who were inoculated they knew not how. Mr. Gowing, of Camden Town, informed the writer, of a boy who once went from a shop to stand at the head of a pony the master of which wished to make a purchase. The animal, while the boy was so placed, cleared its nostrils, and a portion of the ejected matter flew into the lad's eye. The handkerchief removed the soil, and the accident was soon forgotten. However, the poor youth was glandered, and became a patient in the University Hospital.
Such facts sufficiently prove all men have an interest in opposing any conduct likely to generate so horrible a scourge. Man, as a community, is answerable for the comfort of every creature intrusted to his charge. He may refuse to accept the conditions of the trust, but he cannot escape the responsibility. In proof of the truth of this conclusion, glanders is now recognized as one of those incurable diseases, generated by neglect, to which the human being is liable, in every hospital throughout the kingdom.
Why is the legislature behind the medical profession in the extent of its recognitions? Any man may now, according to law, drive or ride a glandered animal through the crowded streets of any town in the three kingdoms. He may, without fear of punishment, endanger the lives of the unsuspecting wayfarers, whom it is the especial province of the Parliament to protect. Why should not the glandered stable be detected, and the animals, dangerously diseased, be slaughtered? Why should any man be allowed to retain, and openly use as property, that which is perilous to society; and wherefore should law protect him, when harboring pestilence for the sake of profit?