Researchers have discovered that horses have a more extensive repertoire of facial expressions than previously thought. There are even some signals that are aimed at other species, such as ear movements. Visit the University of Portsmouth for more details. The project covered a wider range of situations than previously attempted, going beyond human-generated contexts. Some of the horses’ facial repertoire echo similar expressions recorded ith primates.
Recently, there has been a slew of posts about horses on this blog with more discussion than explanation. Some of you may remember that the narrative line in this blog goes back to prehistory, when humanity was sheltering from an ice age climate alongside a number of species that we now work with very closely, such as horses and cows, not forgetting companion creatures, such as cats and dogs. During the ice ages, we didn’t get to choose a place to shelter, we just piled in and got by as best we could. At one end of the spectrum, living in one place by choice can be called domestication, at the other end it can be purgatory. Everybody brings something different to the party: night vision; accurate identification of wild fungi; encyclopaedic knowledge of next year’s runners in the Grand National; whatever. For centuries, the norm has been anthropocentric and horses are expected to fit in with some pretty unimaginative stereotypes. An animal that goes down the gallops most days with Grand National runners would form a view of its rivals fast enough, but it will take humans an eternity to tune into this idea, let alone think of asking for an explanation. Horses just get it. They can see a problem when it’s still just a dot on the horizon.
Humanity, on the other hand, will get shirty and go to war rather than sit down and talk through a problem. At the beginning of the 20th century, the industrial world slaughtered thousands of men and horses for no good reason. Sending mounted troops to shut down machine gun nests just made it worse. For centuries, horses have worked alongside the toiling masses, dragging felled tree trunks to waiting lorries; towing delivery vans; hauling lifeboats to safer launching sites; all manner of heavy work. One hundred years ago, horses used to fill in the gaps in delivery systems, the fabled final mile.
Back then, equidae had a role to play, but things are different now. Somewhere in the economy, a landslip buried the past, imposing a new order and rewriting history. Some of it is as simple as a shift in meaning, take the transition from “load” to “payload”. Anyone can carry a load, even a horse, but it takes precision technology to deliver a payload. Interestingly, however, horsepower is still going strong for the power output of motorised vehicles. During the transition from livestock to automotive innovation, retaining horsepower for comparisons identified some of the advantages of the second wave commercial vehicles. By the mid 1920s, the transition was a fait accompli, in the absence of any additional sources of brood mares. The continuity and availability of four or even three-year olds was held back by a preference for keeping brood mares for riding until their general fitness declined, as does their ability to keep up with the fashionable demand for a rapid high-stepping gait.
More follows later
The end of the 19th century was a time of profound change for the world’s industrial centres. Without realising the consequences for the future, humankind had started to dismantle relationships with the natural world that went back thousands of years. Progress in the mechanisation of industries that spanned entire continents led to the wholesale dumping of old ways of working: new technology was the answer, now what was the question?
For urban populations, the twentieth century brought a degree of hardship and new expectations. Rural populations faced a different set of challenges, notably how to produce more food with fewer people. Technology could be scaled up, but the results had to be deliverable. The English countryside was filled with agricultural investments in steam tractors. Huge, lumbering engines were trampling the face of the earth. The assumption was that new technology would break down old barriers, bringing with it untold wealth. Technology was declaring war on nature.
There was a pressing need to prove that the country could deliver in every sense of the word. Bringing food into towns faced a number of constraints: neither the carrying power nor the feed requirements for draft animals were extendable. Keeping more horses in built-up areas of Victorian London or any other major city was not an option, while the addition of yet more horses coming into town from the suburbs just increased the volume of dung to manage. On the other side of the channel, Parisians took a very different view of horse dung, regarding it as a measure of commercial success and prestige for the most heavily affected quartiers. On the basis of passing horses alone (who would be so indiscreet as to dream of asking what the passengers might be doing?) the Moulin Rouge and parts of Montmartre were knee-deep in earthly riches.
The graph above gives a 60-year narrative: the first 20 years are significant for present purposes. During the prewar years, Britain was home to about 20 motor manufacturers capable of turning out sturdy tractor units, mid-to-long-range lorries or personnel carriers. By the mid-1930s there were close on 40 such firms, including a handful of US manufacturers running British-based assembly lines to serve the embryonic UK road haulage market. There were commercial variants on existing automobile offerings, such as the 7 cwt Model T Ford delivery van, or the General Motors group with its Bedford and Commer ranges.
Road haulage was so new in those days that commercial vehicles and lorries were in short supply. When vehicle registration started for trucks and vans, there were only 4000 in the country. By 1914 there 18,000. The British economy started to struggle and registered truck numbers dropped. During the hostilities, the War Office bought thousands of specialist vehicles to keep the army moving. Once the war was over, thousands of potential commercial motors were sold off cheaply through army surplus outlets. While researching this post I came across a figure of around 6000 disposals. Since motor manufacturers sold the War Office upwards of 20,000 vehicles collectively, they weren’t complaining. Besides, all these motors transferred their paperwork to Civvy Street.
One purchase the British Army hung on to was a track-laying tractor bought in 1910. Top brass acquired four Hornsby track-laying tractors to carry out extensive trials in the long-running search for a battlefield heavyweight. They’ve still got one of them at the Tank Museum — and it still runs!
It is time to review how draft animals are connected to their loads. The simplest example would be a pack horse or a mule, in the days when mule trains carried clay to pottery workshops. The Devon clay that was transported this way earned the name of ball clay, since it was shaped into large balls and carried in a double bag carried on the animal’s back, where a saddle might otherwise have gone. Pack animals are often quite light, enabling them to cross rugged terrain, where roads were not available. It is important to keep a regularly updated note of a draft animal’s weight, taking care not to expect them to carry more than 15-20% of their current weight.
Carts redistribute a load, but slowing down or stopping can be more demanding, particularly when going downhill. The most efficient means of transport, particularly for heavy consignments such as building supplies, is the canal barge. This can be hauled by a (large) single horse, even when loaded with several tonnes of goods.
The relentless development of machine guns and heavy artillery from the turn of the twentieth century raised the stakes of warfare in previously unimaginable ways. Just as there is a case to argue for a wider interpretation of margins, to reflect a product’s costs and value to the economy, there is also a case to be made for revising the criteria by which these items are judged to be of use. Agriculture brings together a number of inseparable variables just to survive, let alone be profitable, making complex trade-offs on the way. Take animals, for instance.
From conception to weaning successive generations of pigs, producers face a steady pull on their resources. In the case of pigs, there will be little prospect of selling from a new litter until the new arrivals can leave their mothers’ sides and feed independently. Once this milestone has been passed, options will become available for breeders.
Animals that are to be raised for slaughter will have a target slaughter weight, somewhere around 100kg for pigs. Any heavier than that and the earning potential will drop steadily, as more feed is consumed and overheads rise. This brings us to a vital distinction that is easily overlooked. The pig producer will generally earn average money by the standards of the sector if the young animals wean successfully and go on to gain a hundred grams per day for the next six months. The market is front-end loaded and is run like clockwork down to the final 24 hours.
The opposite is true for draft animals, which earn their keep by staying alive and working to whatever age their breed can manage. The lead times are longer, the resources needed are greater and in the early 20th century users like the British army were buying extensively for matched pairs and teams of six and more. It is quite clear that by sending draft animals off to battlefields, their value will be turned into an increasingly expensive remounting cycle of the military’s own making, in which the animals can perish within hours of arriving behind the lines. Even if brood mares are kept away from warfare, the early years of the twentieth century effectively wrote a series of blank cheques for the makers of commercial motors and trucks, to fill the haulage gap caused by modern warfare.
When the first world war started in 1914, the world’s armies were accustomed to seeing imposing troops on horseback leading charges across open ground and engaging in the thick of the action. By the end of the battle of Verdun, in December 1916, the former cavalry units were to be found changing their sabres for machine guns and driving armoured vehicles instead of riding horses.
Verdun marked a pivotal point in the first world war, claiming so many lives that it was known as the “meat grinder”. To this day, farmers are still digging up horseshoes from the former battlefield. After decades of developing increasingly powerful artillery and with the arrival of mechanised warfare, the twentieth century battlefield witnessed the massacre of draft animals on a scale never previously imagined.
The British Army did not appreciate just how few horses it could afford to lose. Moving artillery pieces, carrying munitions to gun emplacements, at the turn of the century, modern armies could not operate without horses. From the front line to the billets, draft animals were ever-present. The first world war was deadly: on a particularly bad day, over 7,000 were killed in a conflict that lasted for years and claimed millions of equine lives around the world. Of these, nearly half a million were attached to the British army in some way. Faced with the eye-watering costs of procuring and transporting horses, the government set up the British army veterinary corps. Its skilled veterinary surgeons treated nearly three quarters of a million draft animals.
Despite going to war with extra horses to keep the army supplied, the German government had problems procuring fodder and some animals starved to death. Importing horse-related items was particularly difficult since traders were refusing to take German currency.
Around the world, the heavy losses of working horses created strong demand for alternative transport capacity. In Britain, the War Office pushed up demand for commercial vehicles by dumping 6,000 war surplus lorries and trucks on the market at bargain prices. It is hard to gauge the full extent of wartime losses and their impact on the wider economy, but many businesses that used to be horse-based changed to offer engineering and driving skills.
Horses were among the first animals to be domesticated during millennia of prehistory. You can be sure that the energy needed to build the monuments and cities of antiquity came from horses, mules and donkeys, if it did not come from slaves.
We share a planet with millions of creatures who contribute to planetary processes that keep us alive and yet in ignorance. As a species we have been technically outstanding, but we have ridden roughshod over our neighbours. While proto-agriculturists dedicated millennia to domesticating the forerunners of modern farm animals, they never stopped to reflect on the special role they played in humanity’s most positive phase.
As human populations settled, the first quality they lost was a deep awareness of a wider world beyond their existence. By leaving the land and settling in cities, humanity extinguished any remaining spark of interest in the outside world. This is just one of our nemeses emerging from the shadows. Others will catch us out sooner, but they lack the central importance of a planetary view of the natural world. Writing in Against the Grain, James C Scott reminds us that without the millennia during which prehistoric populations domesticated crops and livestock there would never have been agrarian city states. He also argues that such an important process need not be a linear progression, but that during those years human populations would have probably have lived by more than one activity, the exact combination of which would have changed with the prevailing conditions. Life in prehistory was difficult enough, without trying to stick to a linear progression from nomad to city dweller.
Humanity is too busy chipping away at nature’s remaining toeholds to spot that we, too, depend on similarly fragile foundations. Urban Food Chains started as a repository for interesting insights into the origins of what we eat. Today, it draws from a broader set of sources, in greater depth.
A cornerstone of Urban Food Chains crystallised this evening. Fundamental to the structure of a supply chain is the basic unit of transport and energy. Taking three major themes of this blog, let’s unpack the topic. First, before the dawn of time, generations of early agriculturists worked for millennia to domesticate species and crops that we would recognise today. They also tamed fire, an evolutionary trump card. Their lasting achievement was to breed forerunners of today’s strategic ungulates: cows, pigs, sheep and horses. Fast forward to the early twentieth century, when the first world war slaughtered millions of draft animals.
This high tech cull of horses, in particular, damaged the bedrock of the agricultural world. Livestock numbers would take decades to restore, if indeed there was either the economic resources or the political will to do so. The first world war was a reset that made way for change on a global scale, for humans and animals alike. Thousands of years spent establishing stable working relationships turned to dust in the heat of battle.
The penny dropped when I read Christopher Turnor, an author of the time, complaining that the UK had too many pastures, they were blocking food production. The origins of all this empty grassland are to be found in Edwardian England, but the wartime cull of draft animals accelerated the trend. The rest is not so much history as a race to plug the economic gaps left by the ravages of war.
To paraphrase Saint John, in the beginning was the meal. And the meal was with God…
We live in a world with more explanations than questions, more doubts than answers, more belief than knowledge. What sustains us is an unseen chain of events that conspire to make human life happen, whatever it takes. Our dependence on this process is total. Welcome to the world of food.
Our shared origins go back to the beginning of time before crops or livestock had been domesticated. There is general agreement once hominids had domesticated fire — tamed is probably a better word — there was a further four to six millennia before domesticated animals and crops emerged on the scene. Scholars may disagree over when this change came about, but we can be sure that until it was a fait accompli, everything else in the story of civilisation was on hold. There are quibbles about when exactly such a change can taken as read, but everybody is counting in millennia.
The rest is history. The trouble with history is its dependence on written records and sometimes incorrect attribution of artefacts. The reason we know so little about early agrarian populations is because they had neither written records nor surviving artefacts to bear witness to their passing. This is a pity, since what we do know about these groups is that they lived in harmony with nature and were environmentally enlightened. We are indebted to some of the world’s most dedicated and skillful archaeologists, who have traced the remains of villages that were built in the trackless alluvial wetlands. At this time, hominids and animals fed future generations of flora and fauna. Man was still bound to the laws of nature at this time.
When the world’s first states emerged, they were expressions of an agrarian social structure. Their dealings with the world around them were probably more extensive than we will ever know. What matters is that we learn and understand from such scraps as we can glean, to focus on value without being diverted by units of account.
Anyone with a weakness for biscuits will be interested to know that the complications caused by the application of Meursing numbers to Chapter 19 (pastry and biscuit products) are a thing of the past. Once a place of pilgrimage for importers of third country biscuits, this chapter was originally stuffed with product groups of biscuits ranked by dairy, sugar and flour content. Like a dazzled rabbit in car headlights, UK Brexit negotiators editing the biscuit chapter blew a fuse and deleted the whole lot. Refer to the Common European Tariff to see what you might have missed.
