Rensselaer Republican, Volume 17, Number 3, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 25 September 1884 — The Docile American Horse. [ARTICLE]

The Docile American Horse.

It lias long been accepted as a theory by our transatlantic kinsmen that vice # animals is almost always the result unkindness and maltreatment received by them from their human companions, and that the paucity of vicious horses in the United States is to be explained by the gentleness, and, so to speak, the familiirity with which the noble animal is treated in every part of the Union. There can be little doubt that in no country is the intelligence of quadrupeds more developed and cultivated than in the United States, where it is well understood that by kindness alone can their characteristics, traits, dispositions, and qualities be fully drawn forth. Nothing is more common, for instance, than to see an American horse harnessed to a buggy and standing alone in New York—his master having entered a shop—by the curbstone’s edge, in the midst of the crush and turmoil of Br.oadway, one of the most crowded and noisy thoroughfares upon the face of the earth. Before descending from his buggy the master says a word or two to his horse, and leaves him standing in the street with-, out restraint. The sagacious animal, whose eyes are not shielded b'v blinkers, and who is ..not tormented by a Procrustean hearing-rein, understands perfectly that he is expected to wait until his master has transacted his business; and wait, accordingly, he does, sometimes for hours at a time, and without regard to the winter's cold or summer’s heat. Again, in the wildest parts of the Western and Southern States there is not a farmer who thinks anything of driving his horses by night over a wooden bridge full of holes, caused by many planks having dropped into the stream beneath. The careful beast, who may or may not have crossed the bridge on many previous occasions, feels his way in the darkness, and his head having been surrendered to him by the driver, steps as carefully and with as much precision as a dancing master. Whenever, indeed, a horse is found to he possessed of a violent, or, to use an old Yorkshire word, a “mischancy,” temper in the United States, the odds are in favor of his being' imported from abroad. —London Telegraph.