It seems to me like cruelty, so rings I never use.
There's one thing more I want to show, 'tis Hannah's hen-house, here—
Our poultry always pays us well, and just now eggs are dear—
'Tis warm and clean and bright, you see, with gravel on the ground;
There's food and water standing here each day the whole year round.
But maybe I have tired you, sir—forgive an old man's pride;
But somehow I love dumb critters, and I want their needs supplied.”
“There's one thing in those verses I want to ask about,” said George, when his brother paused. “Uncle Jake says his horses 'wear no foolish blinders, and from check-reins they are free.' Now I want to ask why horses are made to wear blinders in harness, when they don't wear them while under the saddle! I know that the carriage horses in our stables don't wear blinders, but I never thought to ask why.”
“It's because I've given strict orders that none of my horses shall wear them,” Mr. Graham answered. “And my reasons for so ordering I will give in the words of Dr. Humphreys, who has studied the subject and long ago converted me to his way of thinking. Dr. Humphreys says it is charitable to suppose that intelligent people are not designedly cruel. In most cases they are so, more from thoughtlessness than design! Nay, they are often quite astonished to learn—when their attention is called to the subject—that they have long been inflicting some cruelty unwittingly upon some of their dumb servants. This is a busy world, and we live in a very busy part of it, and we may, perhaps, be excused for not looking at every step lest some luckless worm be trod upon.
“'The custom of having wagon or carriage horses wear blinders,' says Dr. Humphrey, 'originated at a period when horses were supposed to be thoroughly vicious and ill-trained, ready to run upon the slightest provocation; to take fright from seeing any passing object,—looking back in anxious dread of the whip—all of which supposes a condition of things now pretty well passed away. Horses are better bred and better trained. The Arab proverb well says: 'The pure blood horse has no vice.' He only wants to know what is required of him and he will do it if within his power. A driver who is fit to drive a horse rarely or never strikes with his whip. A mere motion of the rein or whip is all the horse requires, and all that most horses will submit to. The bad temper and the bad tricks of horses, are made so, nineteen times in twenty, by the causeless brutality of driver or trainer.