They handle horses in the same way, but, fortunately, animals make allowance for ignorance in human beings but a firearm makes no such allowance. Therefore there are fewer accidents to human beings from horses than from firearms, in proportion to the silly things the humans do.
A dog will allow a small child to poke its fingers in its eyes. If a grown person attempted it he would get bitten, but a pistol makes no such distinction.
I was being shown round a remount depot where the horses were picketed out with a hind leg tethered to a peg, when a sour-looking, underbred artillery horse, began kicking at his neighbour.
The horse kicked himself free and trotted off to the corner of the field, where he stood, sulkily, with his ears laid back, a piece of rope wedged between his near hind shoe and the foot.
A man was ordered to bring the horse back. He was wearing a pince-nez of very near sighted type.
Now what he ought to have done was to first catch the horse, taking care not to get kicked whilst doing so, then to hold up a fore leg (so that the horse could not kick), whilst someone else removed the bit of rope from the hind shoe, standing to one side.
Instead, he walked up straight behind the horse. When he got within a few yards of him, to my intense horror, he went down on his hands and knees and began crawling towards the horse’s hind legs.
The horse had been laying back his ears and showing the whites of his eyes and measuring the distance for a kick at the man.
This manœuvre on the man’s part, however, so surprised the horse that he stood quite still, looking at the man enquiringly.
The man crawled up close to the horse’s heels, took out his pocket knife and, putting his nose within a few inches of the horse’s near hind foot, quietly sawed away at the piece of rope with his blunt pocket knife and jerked the ends out from between the shoe and hoof. The horse stood like an angel all the time.