Working With Animals

I've tried to get this topic rolling here a couple of times, without much luck (as I'm the only one who stops in here). None the less, here's another go at it:

Society of the Military Horse • View topic - Working with Animal;s a Census and a Poll

If you can log in at SMH, please post an answer. If not, think about giving one here!

My prior efforts here:


I'm taking a bit of a poll, out of curiosity. It's decidedly unscientific, of course. Anyhow, of those people who stop in here (mostly just me, of course) how many have been in a career where they worked with animals.

If you have not, and most people will have not, how far back, if you know, do you have to go to find a person in your family who had a job working with animals. Any kind of job, farmer, rancher, artilleryman, whatever.

Epilogue:

 Draft horses and youth:

400714_555211947850572_615600276_n.jpg (JPEG Image, 714 × 960 pixels) - Scaled (90%)

Hay Wagon:

 406792_526087687429665_1981292773_n.jpg (JPEG Image, 960 × 739 pixels) - Scaled (80%)

Big Log:

549409_527898253915275_1025268720_n.jpg (JPEG Image, 586 × 432 pixels)

Harvesting Wheat:

531095_523488837689550_1468435760_n.jpg (JPEG Image, 960 × 714 pixels) - Scaled (83%)

Nice one of boy with pump handle and thirsty, or perhaps curious, cows:

https://sphotos-a.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ash3/942918_10151672452323156_1625712334_n.jpg

Nice photo showing urban draft horses.  Draft horses were a huge segment of the horse population up until mid 20th Century, with some railroads owning enormous numbers for in city freighting.  Urban drafts dominated the heavy horse market.

https://fbcdn-sphotos-g-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-ash3/575622_562252533813180_918873072_n.jpg

The Manitoba Cartage & Warehousing Co. was extensively engaged in agriculture and the breeding of Clydesdale horses. This is their award winning six horse hitch in Toronto in 1929. Photo by Cook and Gormley.

Added May 30, 2013.

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Epilogue 2.

Recently there's been some queries about the procurement of horses by the various armies early in World War One.  It's popularly imagined that World War One was the end of the military horse era, but it wasn't.  Millions of horses were used in the war, particularly in the role of draft animals for transport and artillery, and the procurement of horses was a really big deal.

Anyhow, while this thread doesn't really deal with the topic, directly, of the military use of horses and World War One is long enough ago now that darned near everyone who served in it has passed on, there's some interesting topics that this raises, that I'm linking in here

Mobilizing the Horses, 1914.

Draft Remount Training.

British Remounts.

Women and remount training, WWI.

Training Remounts, 1922.

Date Added:  July 29, 2013.

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Epilogue 3

I was a participant in a conversation the other day when somebody volunteered an opinion I hadn't thought of, specifically regarding the practice of law.  That this would end up being posted here, as a comment, I wouldn't have anticipated, but it was an interesting observation.

The specific observation was that the person making the query noted that it must have been enjoyable for some circuit riding lawyers of old to practice because of they rode.  That's an interesting observation.  It is true that American lawyers were sort of a mounted profession at one time, riding the circuit from town to town.  At least John Adams wrote of that in sort of romantic terms. Adams liked horses and he liked riding the circuit. He actually bought his last horse, to train, while he was in his 80s.

I'm sure that not everyone who rode a circuit liked it, but what that does cause me to wonder about is the extent to which everyday life for many people once involved animals, and now does not.  Now it involves pets for many people, but that's the note same thing.  The circuit riding lawyers horse, the ice man's draft horse, and so on were working companions.  I wonder if we haven't lost something, now that they're gone?

Epilogue 4

I've recently added a poll on this topic, for those who might find it interesting, now that there's a poll feature. 

Epilogue 5

  

 City of Houston, mounted police.

Epilogue 6

Recently this topic came up on the World War Two list in the context of armies that used mounted forces during World War Two, which is actually all of them.  This is a misunderstood part of the history of the Second World War, but all armies used horses to greater or lessor degrees.  In response that discussion, the bulk of which I left out, I noted this minor item in regards to the Marines on Okinawa (in addition to a lot of other items);

"Okinawa into service to a very limited extent, showing I guess how that generation contained people who retained equine knowledge."

That brought this response from another poster:

Pat,

That's an interesting point...how widespread would horse-knowledge be among Americans in say 1940? I would guess that a lot of farm life was still dictated by animal power, even though tractors (I am assuming here) had made inroads to American farm since the Model T. I have seen video of Model T's being used in all manners on a farm (using the tires to drive farm equipment via a belt for example).

I replied:

I'll babble on a bit as this is one of my favorite topics.  Indeed, I can probably link in some old SMH threads on this very topic.

Automobiles actually hit the US like a storm starting just prior to World War One.   The Model T was truly revolutionary as it was so widely affordable.  Still, horses remained a much more common means of transportation and work "horsepower" than people imagine today.

Going back to prior to the Great War, the largest single owners of horses in the US and Canada were the railroads.  Railroads had huge numbers of heavy draft horses, and their needs were so predominant that they dominated the draft horse market.  People today like to imagine that heavy drafts were "farm" horses, but they were only farm horses as farmers bread them for sale to draft users in the cities, i.e., railroads and local transportation haulers.  Farmers themselves preferred "chunks", a smaller type of draft animal, but the numbers really began to decline in that category in the early 20th Century.  Anyhow, huge numbers of horses were actually maintained in towns by commercial users.

By WWI local haulers had started to switch to trucks, but horses remained very common, and they continued to remain very common on in to the 1920s.  Horse use in agriculture also remained very common, even with small gasoline engine tractors (by our standards today) making real inroads.

The Great Depression slowed rural mechanization down a great deal, and many farmers who would have switched to tractors chose not to or could not afford to during the 1930s, so horses hung on in farming in a major way.  In local commercial transportation horses greatly declined in the 1930s, but they did not disappear.  You can still find horses in common use for some sorts of urban hauling.  Both my parents, for example, could recall ice being delivered for domestic use by a man who came with a horse drawn wagon.  I have a photo from the 1940s of the City of Montreal clearing snow with a horse drawn snow plow, taken by my mother.

It was really the immediate post war period that picked back up the pace of mechanization in agriculture and eliminated the urban hauling with finality.  There were still regular farmers who used horse or mules as late as the 1950s, but they were very much on the decline.  A friend of mine whose father I knew fairly well once showed me a photo taken of him using the family's mules for the very last time, the summer he reported for basic training during the Korean War.  With his father dead, and with his leaving for the Army, his mothers and brother decided that the time had come for a tractor.

On the other hand, one additional thing to keep in mind is that most town and city dwellers in the US hadn't been horse users for a very long time.  Even in the late 19th Century, when horses were common for all uses, people in towns largely did not use them.  Just too hard to keep in town.  Rural people used them, but those who lived inside a town limit tended not to, as it just wasn't practical to keep one.  Only the wealthy could afford to do so. So, for that reason, it was really the bicycle not the automobile, that was seen at first as a real revolution in transportation for the common man.

So, I guess to answer the question a little more directly, with a much larger percentage of our population living on farms (or ranches, which still use horses today), and with some ongoing urban use, horse familiarity would have been much higher than it is today, but at the same point in time, it would not have been common knowledge amongst most troops either.

  But it was this reply by another participant I wanted to note:

My dad's and mom's families' farms in Missouri still used horses through WWII. They didn't get tractors until well after the war.

Epilogue 7.

Our comments on Horsepower, the equine age.

Epilogue 8

Just the news story my 53 year old self wants to read on a Sunday morning prior to a really busy Monday morning.

RED LODGE, Mont. — Blowing up dead animals was “just part of the deal” in the 16 seasons Nolan Melin worked as a backcountry horse packer and trail crew member for the Forest Service.

“You’ve got to get rid of them,” he said matter-of-factly about a pretty unusual occurrence.

Otherwise, a dead horse or mule might attract bears to a wilderness trail, which is dangerous for humans and the bears.

Horse packing is a skill few people possess in this digital, mechanized age. The profession harkens back to a simpler time when horsepower actually involved a real horse.

In the Forest Service’s Region 1, which encompasses 25 million acres spread across five states, there are only eight full-time horse packers with another 25 who include that specialty in their other duties. So that made Melin a rare breed.

Traute Parrie, retired Beartooth District ranger, said, “When I got to the Beartooth District ranger job, it was some combination of humbling and thrilling to realize I’d landed on a district where we still had a permanent packer, a rare thing these days. It spoke to the values that this district holds important.”

The reality is that it’s also a punishing profession — lifting heavy loads as well as dealing with horses and mules that sometime possess a mind of their own. Most horse packers have several tales about a wild blow up, when animals bucked loose and took off for points unknown.

“Mules are unforgiving if you don’t understand them,” Melin said. “I love those old mules, but they knew who was boss and who they could walk over.”

Worn out at the age of 36, after years of heavy lifting and being thrown from his mount a few times, Melin is stepping down from his job as packer for the Beartooth Ranger District to work in Miles City, Montana. The new job will be closer to his hometown. He grew up on a ranch outside of Ashland.

Different people react differently to a story like this.  I sent it around to a collection of friends and an older one, perhaps now approaching 70, simply lamented how this news story reports the subject as broken down at 36.  There's something to that.  But, for a person who loves the outdoors but who spends every day in offices, imaging an occupation outdoors with horses and mules can't help but seem, well, romantic.

March 16, 2017

Epilogue 9



I ran this earlier this week and then considered that it really ought to be added to this thread.

I know that the German Army, as well as the Austrian army, retained horses and mules in a mountain troop role.  And for that matter I know why they do, so this story isn't a surprise to me.

I have to admit that from the vantage point of my office window or the deposition hall, I have to wonder if I were German or Austrian I would have opted for something like this rather than the direction I took.  That's easy to say, after all, as the probable answer is probably not, given as I'm not working for the Forest Service or the Game & Fish, etc.

Still, it's hard, at least for those of us with a certain mindset, not to look at scenes like this and be a bit envious, something I'm sure that surprises others.

FWIW, horses in a military role and rural police setting role remain highly viable in certain settings are are undoubtedly underused, rather than underused.

February 20, 2019

Yeoman's Laws of History

Everyone is used to the concept that science and nature is governed by certain natural laws. For instance, Sir Isaac Newton discerned Newton's Laws of Motion.  Darwin gave discerned Natural Selection, and so on.

Well, it seems to me that history is governed by certain laws as well.  After long study of the topic, it seems that there are certain constants that repeat themselves again and again, and not just in the "history repeats itself" sense.  No, certain constants reoccur that are well worth noting. As the author, I'm claiming credit for their discovery, and setting them out here.  In future posts, I'll elaborate further on them.

Yeoman's First Law of History.  Everything first happened longer ago than you suspect.

It doesn't matter what the topic is, but the first occurrence of anything is always further back in time than originally thought.  This is why certain distant dates are continually pushed back, and will continue to be. So, take whatever you like, say the first use of the horse, or the first appearance of humans in North America, and you'll find the "first" date gets more and more distant in time.  Things that were thought to happen, say, 5,000 years ago, turn out to have happened 50,000 years ago, or 500,000 years ago, as we gain better data.

Yeoman's Second Law of History.  Everything last occurred more recently than you suppose.

Here too, it doesn't matter what the topic is, it happened much more recently than you think it did.  Almost everything and every behavior is really durable, if it had any purpose in the first place.

For example, last bayonet charge?  Are you thinking World War One?  Nope, the British did one in Iraq.  Small unit, but none the less they did it.  And in the Second Gulf War.  Last cavalry charge?  Civil War?  No again, they've happened as recently as the current war in Afghanistan.  Last use of horse mounted troops?  Well. . . we aren't there.  It's still going on.  We're never as far from what we think is the distant past as we imagine.

Yoeman's Third Law of History.  Culture is plastic, but sticky.

Eh?  What could that mean. Well, just this.  Cultures mold themselves over time, to fit certain circumstances and developments, but they really persevere in ways that we can hardly appreciate.

We like to believe, in the West, that all cultures are the same, but that is very far from true. And we also like to believe that they "modernize," by which we mean that they "westernize."  They can, but their basic roots do not go away, and they don't even really change without the application of pressure and heat.  Cultures, in that sense, are like metamorphic rocks.  It takes a lot of time, heat, and intense pressure to change them, and even then, you can tell what they started off as.

Examples?  Well, when I was a student in school it was often claimed by our teachers that citizens of the USSR liked their government, having known nothing else, and that everything of the old Russian culture was dead.  Man, that couldn't have been further from the truth. When the lid came off the USSR in 1990, all sorts of old cultural attributes of the various old peoples of the Russian Empire came roaring back. Cossacks remembered that they were Cossacks.  Lithuanians remembered they were Lithuanian. The Russian Orthodox Church experienced a spectacular revival.  Even protests in Russia remain uniquely, and strangely, old Russian.  Nothing had actually gone away.

This is true of all cultures. Even here in the US.  The old Puritans may be gone, but much of their views towards our natures and work very much remain.  Even when cultures take big vacations from themselves, they tend to find their way back over time, at that, and will surprisingly reemerge when thought long gone.

Yeoman's Fourth Law of History.  War changes everything

This is something that somehow is repeatedly forgotten by those who advocate wars.  I'm not a pacifist by any means, but it should be remembered that wars change absolutely everything, about everything.  No nation goes into a war and comes back out the same nation.  People's views about various things change radically due to war, entire economies are dramatically changed, and of course the people who fight the war are permanently changed.

We've discussed this here from time to time in regards to specific topics, but this law is so overarching that the impact of it can hardly be exaggerated.  Every time a nation enters a war, it proposes, in essence, to permanently alter everything about itself.

Yeoman's Fifth Law of History.  When a war ends is when the defending party decides that it is over.

When nations start a war, they have a "war aim."  But that aim rarely determines when a war ends.  Wars are over when the party that is attacked decides that the war is over.

The Germans, during World War Two, thought that the war in the West was over when they knocked France out of the war, but the British did not believe that, so it did not end. In the East, the Germans thought advancing to the Volga meant victory over the USSR.  The Soviets, however, had no such concept so the war went on.  Conversely, the Imperial Russians in World War One gave up long before they were really defeated.  They just gave up.  Wars end when the party that was attacked decides that they are over.

Yeoman's Sixth Law of History.  There was no age of innocence.

A persistent idea about any one violent era in history is that the era that preceded it was "an age of innocence", or that the violent historical event ended a country's "innocence."  Even really first rate historians will claim, in various works, that an era immediately before what they're writing about "ended the country's innocence.".

Well, while these events, particularly if they are wars, and that's usually what is being addressed in this context, may change everything (see Holscher's Fourth Law of History), the era before them is never an "age of innocence," as there never was such an age.  That's a nostalgic concept that does not fit reality.

For example, over time, I've read of World War Two, World War One, and the Civil War ending "America's innocence.".  Bunk.  None of those horrific events, and they were horrific, ended an age of innocence. They may have been titanic disasters, and horrors of the first rate, but they did not end ages of innocence.  By the time of the American Civil War the country had been through the Revolution, the War of 1812, the Mexican War and any number of horrific Indian Wars that made those that came after the Civil War look comparatively blood free.  And this doesn't even address the violence of slavery and sectarian strife that came before the Civil War.  And even if a person imagines that the country slipped into an age of innocence after the Civil War they'd be sadly mistaken. Prior to World War one came the economic panic of the 1890s, the Indians Wars (including such events as Little Big Horn and the Wounded Knee), the Spanish American War and the Philippine Insurrection.  Prior to World War Two, of course, we World War One and the Great Depression.

And the same is true for any other country a person could pick out.  The British, for example, had the Anglo Irish War before World War Two, the Boer War before World War One, and so on.

None of this is meant to be commentary on the big events mentioned. Rather, the frequent claims that a person reads some event unique exposed a country, for the first time, the the horrors the world has to offer, is simply wrong.

Posted December 28, 2012.

Yeoman's Seventh Law of History.  No accurate history can be written until 60 years have passed since the event.

A really thorough history of  an event cannot be written close in time to the event.  Indeed, several decades must pass from the event's occurrence before an accurate history can be written.

That may sound shocking (although at least historian Ladislas Farago noted this in the introduction to his early biography of George S. Patton; Patton:  Ordeal and  Triumph) but its true.  Close in time to an event, authors tend to be too much men of their own times with their views colored by the context of those times. Such influences tend to remain at least as long as twenty years after an event occurs.  Direct participants in an event have a stake in what occurred, which also tend to inform and color their views.

Beyond that, however, and very significantly, authors who write close in time to an event, including those who participated in it, tend to simply accept certain conditions as the norm, and therefore diminish their importance int their writings or omit them entirely.  Conversely, they tend to emphasize things that were new or novel, for the same reasons.  Given that, early written records tend to overplay the new and omit the routine, so that later readers assume the new was the normal and they don't even consider the routine.

Take for example the often written about story of the German army during World War Two.  Only more informed historians realize that most of the German army was no more mechanized during World War Two than it was during World War One.  Fewer yet realize that a fair number of German soldiers remained horse mounted during World War Two for one reason or another.  Period writers had little reason to emphasize this, however, as it really wasn't novel at all at the time, and not very dramatic either, and reflected similar conditions in many armies.

This doesn't mean that early works and first hand recollections aren't valuable.  Rather, it means that a person cannot base his final view on those early works, however.  It also provides the answer as to why later historical works on a frequently addressed topic are not only valuable, but necessary.  Rick Atkinson's and Max Hasting's recent works on World War Two, for example, really place the conflict in context in all sorts of ways for the very first time.  The plethora of new books on the First World War that were at first regarded as revisionist are in fact corrective, and likewise the war is coming into accurate focus for the first time.

Date added:  June 11, 2014.

Yeoman's Eighth Law of History:  Myths, unless purely fanciful, almost always have a basis in reality.

In cultures that write things down, the concept that myths, which were primarily related by word of mouth, have any basis in reality seems to come as a shock. But they normally do.

It is the spoken word that is the default means of transmitting information, including history, in human beings.  The written word is a learned behavior, indeed one that must not only be learned but nurtured in order to take root.   Even now, a lot of people will take and retain information better orally than in a written form.

But oral transmission is always subject to decay with the teller, and the tricks the mind uses to retain the story warp it a bit by default. But that doesn't mean that the stories were never true in any fashion.

All the time we find that historians and archeologist are surprised to learn that something thought to be a myth has some basis in reality.  Probably most do. Troy turns out to have been a real city (and the war was probably over the teenage wife of a teenage king, I'll bet), the Navajo and Apache turn out to be from the far north originally and so their memories of their being great white bears and great white birds are spot on.  Myths, even very old ones, if carefully discerned usually have some basis in fact.

Date added:  April 1, 2015

Yeoman's Ninth Law of History:  You don't know the "right" side of history, until its history.

Pundits and advocates are fond of saying that this or that is on the "right" side of history, by which they mean the side of any one issue that they feel, based on the feelings of the day, will surely prevail.  The trouble is, those feelings are just that.  You don't really know what will prevail, until Holscher's Seventh Law of History has had its day.

History is full of movements and issues that were on the "right" side of history, which turned  out not to be at all.  Prohibition was a hugely popular movement which newspapers everywhere supported while condemning its opponents as naive rubes but which, when it became the (at first) hugely popular law of the land in the United States, and elsewhere, lasted less than fifteen years.  During the 1920s and 1930s fascism was widely commented upon as being a movement which was so valid that it would replace democratic institutions everywhere and which should be supported where it had taken root, even in democratic countries.  Communism was lauded in the liberal left as the next step in liberal and progressive thought and widely held as an inevitable next step in history, a view which its own foundational documents held to be a scientific inevitability.  Even staunch anti-communists such as Whitaker Chambers publicly stated that it would win and even as late as the 1980s I myself had to read a book in college arguing that the entire world should be placed under a Communist government in order to avoid a surely inevitable nuclear war.

There are many other such examples.  The fact of the matter is however that many movement, trends, and instabilities don't survive the bright sun of reality which burns them away.  We don't really know what will survive that sun's glare until it does, by which time many of us who worried, endured or supported them will have passed onto history ourselves.

Date added:  January 4, 2019.