A CONTRAST by Editor

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Mountain View, California · Sep 26, 1906

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 32, No. 37.

A CONTRAST.

By Editor

WE hope all our readers will read this from a Columbus (Ohio) paper:

"Two horses stood, yesterday, hitched near each other on Gay Street. One of them was patient, comfortable, and in good temper; flies lighted upon his back occasionally, but he drove them away with a switch of his long tail. The other horse was impatient, restless, and in bad humor. He was stamping the ground and moving back and forth the vehicle to which he was hitched. Occasionally he would throw his head around angrily, and he had been champing his bit till his mouth was covered with foam. The flies alighted on him and stayed there. He could not dislodge them. He moved his tail, but it was only a stump. It had been docked, its usefulness destroyed in order that some person's foolish or cruel fancy might be pleased. There was in the contrast of those two horses a lesson that ought to have been sufficient to convince any person of the barbarity of docking horses' tails and leaving the animals at the mercy of insects. Any person who saw, and still could not understand, should try the experiment of sitting out in a field with arms bound and all means for keeping flies away removed. Docking is a blight on our civilization. The beauty and usefulness of the tail are destroyed, and the man who does it or countenances it is marked as thoughtless or brutal."—Our Dumb Animals.