The real Argentine: Notes and Impressions of a Year in the Argentine and Uruguay

by J. A. Hammerton

Cathedral and Plaza Matriz, Montevideo.

Plaza Independencia and Avenida 18 de Julio, Montevideo.

I have no wish to harry the feelings of the reader, and I have personally trained myself to a certain degree of fortitude in looking upon suffering, for I am not at all sure that the Cæsars who invented and maintained the Coliseum at Rome chiefly for the purpose of hardening the populace by familiarising them with bloodshed, were not wise in their generation. I have no patience with the maudlin sentimentalist or the ultra-sympathetic person who melts into tears or prepares to faint at the sight of blood. For such as they, a few months’ wanderings in the streets of Buenos Ayres would be an admirable training; but for the ordinary man of feeling, it is a purgatory of pain. Horses innumerable, with diseased, swollen legs, broken skin, and bleeding fetlocks, are familiar objects of the streets. To horses in good condition, life during the warmer months in Buenos Ayres is bad enough, plagued as they are by the myriads of flies and mosquitoes; but to the poor animals suffering from wounds, no mind can imagine what their torture is, for these insect pests swarm ever to the open wounds, and I have seen a horse almost mad with agony from the clustering flies sucking the blood at an open sore on its body. Sleep is impossible in the neighbourhood of a cab rank, as through the sultry night the standing horses will be heard stamping their feet in the most irritating manner on account of the plaguing insects.

Of course, much of this ill-treatment is due “to want of thought as well as to want of heart,” and we must not be indiscriminate in denouncing the Argentine. I have seen, for instance, two fine horses yoked together, one of them in a state of semi-collapse from high fever, obvious even to me that has no special knowledge of horseflesh, by its nostrils being entirely stuffed with yellowish-green matter, while it tried to rest its fevered head against its yoke-fellow. This, of course, was bad economy, the one horse most certainly infecting the other, and almost certainly both of them being doomed to early death. But at the back of it was crass ignorance and carelessness, the two qualities so eminent in all service throughout the Argentine.

I recall also a coachman thrashing two horses attached to a heavy wagon, because they were going so slow. The man was losing his wits with rage as he madly applied his whip to the poor brutes, who were struggling and sweating to move the wagon, empty though it was, along the road. I pointed out to him that he had omitted to undo the chains with which the wheels were locked. He thereupon jumped down, still in a state of high dudgeon, undid the chains, and got back again to his seat, and began the lashing as freely as before, but certainly with better result.

“La gente aqui ne se fija en nada” (the people here don’t pay attention to anything), a Spanish friend of mine was fond of saying. His experience was precisely the same as my own. Instructions of the most explicit kind, given for the discharge of some little task, were never by any possible chance correctly carried out. The person addressed never seemed to take any intelligent interest in what was being said to him. He nodded with a confident Si, señor, to everything, and comprehended nothing. The sense of care and attention had not been developed in him. This extraordinary failing is not characteristic merely of the Argentine, but actually exists in greater degree in other parts of South America. It explains much of the apparent apathy to suffering, and the lack of care for the domestic animals.

I remember we had been but a few days in our apartment at the hotel when, looking out of a window one morning, I saw a woman in the side street come to the door and throw a biggish black and white object into the street. Presently a cart came along, and the horse knocked this object on to the tram lines. Then came a tram and cut through it; then numerous other horses and coaches passed over it. Taking my field glasses, I could make out that it was a large cat, which had evidently died overnight and was thus disposed of by its mistress. Within a few hours it had been so pounded out of recognition that by the evening practically nothing of it remained. This I afterwards found was quite a common method of disposing of household pets when they had ceased to be, forced upon the people, perhaps, by the simple fact that few of the dwelling houses have a back yard, and none have an inch of front space.

Where such indifference to the welfare of men’s animal friends and helpers exists, humanitarianism is necessarily a plant of slow growth. That it has been planted, the Sarmiento Society serves to show, and although nothing whatever can be hoped for from the Church, which is supremely indifferent to the suffering of the animal world, there are certain warmer human qualities in the Argentine people which in due time will triumph over the present era of active brutality and apathy. Horses are too cheap and food too dear for their lives to be a subject of solicitude with the Argentines. If these economic conditions were to be modified in some way, that might also help to a change of feeling.