A fascinating history of a hard worker

Draught horses are beautiful beasts ten times your weight and bulk. It’s good to have them as friends. 

I can write about these gentle giants but have the misfortune to suffer a chronic allergic reaction to horses of any kind. My family through the generations had a good relationship with their four-legged friends and fellow workers, but not I. The best I can do is put together items such as this or the one I wrote on Starts At 60 three years ago about my grandfather talking with a neighbour whose horse suffered a dose of colic.

But on with the story.

Around 8,000 B.C., in the fertile Mesopotamian plains between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, people realised the benefit of gathering wheat, barley and lentil seeds to cultivate. With irrigation from the two rivers, they began the first, basic form of plant domestication, or farming. Other civilisations, including the South and Central Americans (potatoes and maize) and Asians (rice), also improved their lives through plant cultivation.

At much the same time, the Mesopotamians commenced the domestication of animals for the milk, meat and hides they could provide. Perhaps first among these would have been goats, especially valued for their nutritious milk, meat and, especially, hides that provided clothing and material for construction of tents. Other wild animals soon to follow included hens, sheep and cows. Later there would be oxen and, of course, the horse, both of which were to become beasts of burden, aiding man in the preparation of larger tracts of land for cultivation. They lent themselves to early domestication because they were herbivores.

Perhaps more than any other animal, horses have helped mankind in clearing land to cultivate, and then in the method of cultivation. (Oxen – bullocks – have certainly played their part, too, but are the subject of a separate story.) There have been many strains bred over time, bloodlines for riding, racing and working, but I want now to come forward to the modern ‘draught’ horse.

There are several breeds of large horse – work horse, heavy horse, dray horse (which word most likely came into the English language from the Old Dutch, dragen, ‘to carry’, and produced, in this context, the word draught), including Clydesdale, Belgian, Percheron, Shire and Suffolk Punch. The Australian draught horse has developed through crossbreeding and selecting the best traits of these earlier types (with the Belgian a later addition).

The Van Dieman’s Land Company in Tasmania, with its huge acreage needing cultivation and pasture improvement (it remains today the largest dairy in the southern hemisphere) was an early leader in the horse’s development. They imported a number of English and Flemish stallions and mares in the very early years of the 19th century, later exporting them to South Australia and Western Australia in the 1830s.

For a moment, we must return to the bullocks. They actually provided a great amount of the effort required for land clearing in much of Australia up to the end of the gold rush days, after which a need for faster load movement became paramount.

The draught horse was refined and provided primary service until the end of World War One, at which time they were steadily replaced by tractors. This growth was curtailed by the Great Depression, from which came a resurgence in horses. After the Second World War, the draught horse was again pretty well overtaken by tractors.

There is a big difference in handling , something that will never be lost while ever there are those dedicated to preserving the relatively gentle art of using horses in preference to things mechanical. With a tractor, it’s a matter of hopping on board, turning a key, selecting a gear and setting a throttle, something that gets the working day under way in a matter of seconds. With a horse, on the other hand, there is something that’s never going to happen with a tractor: bonding. This may entail any of the following – feeding, grooming, shovelling manure, picking stones from hooves, curing colic (!), petting and persuading the gentle giant into harness.

Instead of increasing throttle, turning a steering wheel or stepping on brakes, the horseman applies vocal commands, perhaps including: ‘Giddup’ (get up) or ‘Giddyup’ (get ye up) sets the horse in motion, ‘Gee’ or a smooch (like calling a cat) to go right, ‘Haw’ to go left, ‘E-e-easy’ to slow, and of course, ‘Whoa’ to stop, all combined with a soft hand on the reins. There are variations on the theme, but don’t you think it a much more genteel way of life, man and beast establishing an affiliation and sharing a mutual task, walking field and furrow together in all weathers?

Man wasn’t always able to get things right but certainly managed it with this relationship. This final par provides an example, something that happened at least half a century back:

I recall reading of a man named Ben Cook, RSM at Britain’s Army Technical College. Cook was renowned for his attitude towards his horses and their well-being. He had his own way of dealing with apprentices who failed to think first of their charges. Sandwiches and drinks would be taken to the boys mid-morning. If they started immediately on their own sustenance before providing water or fodder to their four- legged workmates, Cook would take them and harness them in the shafts. “You fed yourselves and not your charges. You do their work!” And thus it was… but I doubt he’d get away with it in this modern age!

Are you a horse lover?