The story below contains frank discussions of cruelty to animals. If this sort of material is distressing to you, I would strongly recommend passing this by.

Bright lights. Packed stands. Ragtime standards filter out from a Wurlitzer organ as a parade of horses strut into manicured arena, prancing practically in time to the music. This is a show for the Tennessee Walking Horse (TWH). The competition has a wholesome atmosphere; the anachronistic aesthetics of the horses and riders hint at deeply rooted and proudly held traditions. Yet among the traditions of the TWH community is one that shatters the image of human and animal partnership. For many of these show horses, training includes the deliberate mutilation of their front legs. I’d like to explore the reactions to this abusive practice of ``soring'' within the TWH community, within the developing postwar animal protectionist community, and within American society at large. Although the TWH community recognized the cruelty of the practice, the attempts that the industry made to contain the practice were flattened by the attention given to the practice by animal protection organizations that were flush with public support and landmark legislative victories.

Descended from the confluence of northern and southern Saddlebred, Morgan, Thoroughbred, and Standardbred bloodstock following the Civil War, the TWH is a uniquely American breed of horse. The breed's defining characteristic is the distinctive running walk that it performs in lieu of the trot. The running walk, which doesn't jostle the rider like the trot, makes the TWH comfortable to ride for long stretches. The breed was developed to meet the utilitarian needs of farmers and plantation owners who required a horse enduring enough for farm work, yet stylish enough to show off on the weekends. Competitions for TWHs developed out of the county fair circuit of exhibitions in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Only a minority of horses see the inside of the show ring, as the TWH community is built on the backs of pleasure horses, but the ones who do are judged subjectively on their way of going, and on the style of their gaits.

The marquee events of any TWH show are the performance classes, in which, according to the Tennessee Walking Horse Breeders' and Exhibitors' Association (TWHBEA) the horses parade around the arena with “animation and accentuated brilliance.”

In the performance classes, the horse that performs the ideal running walk covers as much ground as possible with as few strides as possible. This highly stylized form of the running walk, where the horse flings his front legs out in a high, sweeping arc, while stepping deeply under his body with his hind legs, is called the “big lick.” The quality of gait that a TWH can perform is dependent on the horse's natural ability, but time, skill, and proper training can develop a TWH's natural running walk into a showstopping lick. However, a dubious shortcut for proper training emerged in the TWH community around 1950. Trainers realized that if they “touched up” their horses' front pasterns with caustic agents, their horses' attempts to escape the resultant pain would artificially induce the big lick. This soring causes the horse to move in a characteristically pained shuffle, as he takes an unusual amount of weight onto his haunches to remove as much pressure from his front legs as possible. The shuffle became the origin of the colloquial names of the agents used to sore TWHs. Mercury oxide was sold as “creeping cream,” and mustard oil as “scootin' juice.” Trainers also employed diesel, turpentine, and croton oil. Because chemical agents often caused noticeable scarring, open sores, and bleeding wounds, trainers devised mechanical forms of soring. Farriers shoe TWHs with stacks of pads, lifting the horse’s heel unnaturally higher than the toe, and concentrating the weight of the animal onto only a small section of the hoof.

Soring arose at a time when the American public was becoming attuned to questions of animal welfare, and at a time when animal welfare legislation was sweeping through Congress. Postwar animal protection organizations in the United States saw an unprecedented period of growth. The status of animals bore witness to rising tensions in American society surrounding science, leisure, and consumption. The opening salvo of the postwar animal protection campaign targeted the American meat industry. Meat consumption in the United States had skyrocketed following the Second World War. In the late 1940s, the average American consumed 55 pounds of beef per year. By 1970, the average American was eating up to 100 pounds of beef per year. The meatpacking industry was more than willing to meet that demand. However, in stark contrast to other industries that were reaping the benefits of postwar technological progress, slaughterhouses met demand simply by speeding up the production line. Animal activists targeted the ineffectual method of stunning livestock with a pole axe, often wielded by an exhausted worker trying to meet a production quota, before being hoisted, shackled, and butchered. The campaign, buoyed by graphic images of archaic slaughterhouse killing floors, reached a public that was in favor of moderate animal welfare legislation. Livestock welfare, which required no sacrifices or inconvenience on the part of the consumer, was quintessentially palatable and moderate. Under pressure, Congress passed the Humane Slaughter Act (HSA) in 1958.

The passage of the HSA proved that postwar animal activists had succeeded in seizing national political power through their lobby. Taking advantage of this momentum, animal protectionists lobbied for legislation to regulate the use of animals in laboratories. The use of animals for experimentation had risen dramatically following World War Two as corporations and the government funded tests for everything from cosmetics to chemical weapons, with one estimate suggesting that between 45 and 60 million animals were used each year during the 1960s. The law that resulted from the protectionists' lobby, the Laboratory Animal Welfare Act (LAWA), was passed in 1966. The campaign for the LAWA was not a campaign to ban vivisection, just as the campaign for the HSA challenged the meat industry, not meat consumption. Couched in the same moderate tone as the HSA, the law prevented the use of stolen animals for research, established minimum standards of care for laboratory animals, and authorized the USDA to regulate facilities and animal dealers.

The American public was primed to accept moderate animal welfare legislation. And animal protection groups placed soring directly alongside livestock and laboratory animal welfare as one of their marquee issues. The campaign to end soring, aided by the black-and-white nature of the issue, followed the same moderate tone of the campaigns for the HPA and the LAWA. While the sacrifice of food and laboratory animals was understood to be beneficial for society, Americans recognized that the deliberate mutilation of a horse's legs was not done for societal benefit, but for individual pleasure. Christine Stevens, President of the Animal Welfare Institute (AWI) from 1951 to 2002, eloquently summarized this recognition, stating:

The suffering inflicted on animals is generally justified or accepted on the grounds that their sacrifice is necessary for the benefit of mankind. The agony inflicted on the Tennessee Walking Horse is without any justification whatsoever.

Nor were the preponderance of Americans directly impacted by a ban on soring. The Tennessee Walking Horse Breeders' and Exhibitors' Association (TWHBEA), which maintained the breed registry, had approximately 60,000 registered TWHs on their books in 1960. This was at most two percent of the American equine population.

Activists patterned their campaign against soring after their campaigns for the HSA and the LAWA, quickly politicizing the deplorable conditions they found at TWH shows -- horses with open wounds, and horses collapsing in the arena from pain -- as they had slaughterhouses and laboratories. The anti-soring campaign even had their own tragic mascot in the form of a three-year-old TWH named Papa Charcoal. The American Horse Protection Association (AHPA) purchased Papa Charcoal at a sale held in conjunction with the National Celebration. Pearl Twyne, President of the AHPA, remarked that:

Both pasterns of the forefeet were raw and bloody.

One TWH trainer asserted that Papa Charcoal was a “relatively clean horse” in comparison to the horses that had been entered in the National Celebration. A veterinarian who examined Papa Charcoal after his purchase described the animal as the most unsound that he had seen in two decades of practice, and diagnosed him with a bowed tendon, deep cuts, and sprained suspensory ligaments.

(Continued below)

Greetings fellow AH travellers! This week’s Saturday Showcase Series entry has, rather unfortunately, been delayed until next week. It turns out that writing a six-part deep dive with fairly thorough sourcework, some rhetoric sprinkled here and there, as well as that all important photo gallery, is very hard to do whilst also studying for mock exams which start on Monday. Rest assured however, that next Saturday Showcase there will be the six-part “special” entry for any and all of you to unwind with (after all, who doesn’t like a good bit of reading on AH to unwind after the stresses of real life?).

However, this week’s entry from me will be a bit more of a “sneak peek” at what’s in the works for next Saturday, so I hope that plenty of you will be interested in reading that writeup when it does drop in about 168 hours or so. Specifically, below are a few quotes “without context” from the writeup so far, so bonus points if you can guess what this fourth Saturday Showcase Series entry will be about! If you need a further hint, this photo ought to go some way towards helping you out. I must also ask that if you have already read the MAIN Saturday Showcase (in which case I must thank you), please do tell me what you thought of the first part with the whole “scene setting” at the Exposition Universelle 1900. That’ll go some way towards influencing the short-term future of the series entries, and any feedback in general on any of the entries thus far would be highly appreciated.

Until next week, happy history reading!

Saturday Showcase Entry #4 without context:

“His knowledge of foreign relations must have been acquired in a music hall.”

“any names which do not yield their corresponding persons by quick Google search is likely a purely fictional character devised for the purpose of slight entertainment.”

“The noodles seem to have had a lucid interval.”

“You ask too much for your friendship.”

“The disputed frontier of Venezuela has nothing to do with any of the questions dealt with by President Monroe.”

“This is damned dull.”

“Slow but unstoppable, like a glacier, some said.”

“Woe to the country that has a child for a king!”

“As a rule, good works are in German.”

“A sight to make surrounding nations state; A kingdom trusted to a school-boy’s care.”

“Ach, that damned Reichstag.”

“All prefer competition to exclusiveness and dismemberment."

" It goes without saying that ... would, considering his current disposition and seniority, not wish to undergo the same stress and duties that his predecessor from a past century went through."

"The most brilliant failure in history."

"He tried to impress at every opportunity, too polite, not unintelligent, and also not without education, a wandering archive. Un rat de chancellerie."