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CHAPTER XV
THE END
VERY few horses are allowed to end their days in peace, after
long and faithful service, like the Duke of Wellington's old charger Copenhagen,
in the paddocks at Strathfieldsaye. London horses, in particular, rarely die
natural deaths. Many of them are sent back into the country in a vain hope that
they will 'come round'; many of them are poleaxed for very shame at their
miserable appearance; some of them slip and injure themselves beyond recovery in
the streets.
A dreadful object this of a suffering horse, sprawling in one
of our main roads with the usual crowd around it. 'Why cannot he be killed at
once? Why must he linger in agony? Surely-' Quite so, gentle reader, and
indignant letter-writer to the daily newspapers, but do not be in a hurry! The
driver has no right to order the horse to be killed; it is not his property, but
his master's; and before he can give the order the master has to be found, and
the master does not, in many cases, care to lose his horse irrevocably, and
appeals to his vet.; and so, while the driver is finding his master, and the
master is finding his vet., the horse lies suffering in the street. When the
needful [-184-]
ermission is obtained, a telephone message to Harrison
Barber brings the cart on the scene, and within half an hour of that message the
horse is not only dead, but being cut up in one of the Harrison Barber depots.
There are seven of these depots in strategical positions round and in London,
where the carts are kept cleaned and in readiness, tools and all, like fire
engines, ready to be turned out and on the way in less than five minutes from
the receipt of the call.
A curious trade is that of the horse-slaughterer, who must
not only have a licence, but carry on his operations in accordance with the 26th
of George III. and other Acts of Parliament. No horse that enters his yard must
come out again alive, or as a horse. The moment it enters those gates it must be
disfigured by having its mane cut off so close to the skin as to spoil its
value, and though it may be put in a 'pound' on the premises, which might better
be called a condemned cell or a moribundary, it must not remain there for more
than three days.
In Garratt Lane, Wandsworth, is the largest horse-slaughtering yard in London. It has existed for about a hundred years. There it
stands, practically odour-less, by the banks of the winding Wandle, with a wide
meadow in front of it and a firework factory next door, the magazine of which is
within measurable distance of its boiler-house. One fine morning - it was really a
beautiful morning - we found our way down the lane, along the field, armed with
Mr. Ross's permit, to be initiated by Mr. Milestone into the mysteries of a
horse's departure from the London world.
The last scene does not take long. In two seconds [-185-]
a horse is killed; in a little over half an hour his hide is
in a heap of dozens, his feet are in another heap, his bones are boiling for
oil, his flesh is cooking for cat's meat. Maneless he stands; a shade is put
over his eyes; a swing of the axe, and, with just one tremor, he falls heavy and
dead on the flags of a spacious kitchen, which has a line of coppers and boilers
steaming against two of its walls.
In a few minutes his feet are hooked up to cross-beams
above, and two men pounce upon him to flay him; for the sooner he is ready the
quicker he cooks. Slash, slash, go the knives, and the hide is peeled off about
as easily as a tablecloth; and so clean and uninjured is the body that it looks
like the muscle model we see in the books and in the plaster casts at the
corn-chandler's. Then, with full knowledge gained by almost life-long practice,
for the trade is hereditary, the meat is slit off with razor-like knives, and
the bones are left white and clean and yet unscraped, even the neck vertebrae
being cleared in a few strokes - one of the quickest things in carving imaginable.
If there is any malformation the sweep of the knife is stayed
for a moment; that is all. The same sort of thing has always been seen before,
and there is no hesitation about the way to deal with it. No matter of what
breed or age or condition the horse may be, his 'boning' is not delayed by
peculiarities. And horses of all sorts, some of them sound and in the prime of
life, here meet their doom - the favourite horse killed at his master's death, to
save him from falling into cruel hands; the runaway horse that has injured a
daughter; the brute that has begun to kick and bite; the mildest-[-186-]mannered mare that has, perhaps, merely taken a wrong turn
and made her mistress angry - all come here to die with the hundreds of the
injured and the old. Taking them all round, the old and young and sound and
ailing, they average out in the men's opinion at rather over eleven years when
they here meet their doom.
Soon the bare skeleton remains to be broken up, and in
baskets go aloft to be shot into a huge digester, where it is made to yield
about a quarter hundredweight of oil. Following the oil, we see it cleared of
its stearin, pressed out between huge sheets of paper, and remaining in white
cakes like gauffres ready for the candle-makers; and we see the oil flowing
limpid and clear into the tank above, from which it is barrelled off to be used
eventually for lubricating and leather-dressing purposes.
Returning to the bones, we find them out on the flags, clean
and free from grease, ready to be thrown into a mill, from which they emerge
like granite from a stonebreaker, along a sloping cylindrical screen, which
sorts the fragments into sizes varying up to half an inch. And stretching away
from us are sacks, full to the brim with bones, all in rows like flour-sacks at
a miller's, all ready to go off to the manure merchants. And still further
following the bones, we find some of them ground to powder and mixed with
sulphuric acid to leave the premises as another form of fertiliser.
Having seen the bones off the premises, we follow the feet,
of which we find a huge pile, not a trace of which will be left before the day
is out. The skin and hoofs will go to the glue-makers and blue-makers; the [-187-]
bones will go to the button-makers; the old shoes will go to
the farrier's and be used over and over again, welded in the fire and hammered
on the streets, so that all that is lost of a horseshoe is what rusts or is
rubbed off in powder.
With a glance at the tails and manes, which will soon be lost
in sofas, chairs, or fishing-lines, we reach the heap of hides, which will
probably find its way to Germany to be made into the leather guards on cavalry
trousers, or, maybe, stay in this country for carriage roofs and whip-lashes.
This distribution of the dead horse may seem to be an odoriferous business, but
the odours are reduced to a minimum by an elaborate ventilating system which
draws off all the fumes and emanations into a line of pipes, and passes them
over a wide furnace to be burnt, so that none of them reach the outer air.
But now for the 'meat,' which, cut into such joints as the
trade require, has been boiling in the coppers and is now done to a turn, with
just the central tint of redness and rawness that suits the harmless, necessary
cat, while the 'tripe' is doing white in another copper to suit the palate of the
less fastidious dog.
Harrison Barber, Limited, the successors of the once great
Jack Atcheler, dead some thirty years since, kill 26,000 London horses a year.
All night and all day the work goes on, this slaying and flaying, and boning and
boiling down, and this cooking for feline food. Go to any of their depots
between five and six o'clock in the morning, and you will find a long string of
the pony traps and hand-carts, harrows and perambulators, [-188-]
[-189-]
used
in the wholesale and retail cat's-meat trade. The horse on an average yields 2
cwt. 3 qrs. of me at; 26,000 horses a year means 500 a week, which in its turn
means 70 tons of meat per week to feed the dogs and cats of London.
This
is not all the 'meat' that is sold, nor all the London horses that are killed,
for the horseflesh trade is large enough to employ thirty wholesale salesmen;
but taking even this ten tons a day, we shall find it means 134,400 meals,
inasmuch as a pound of meat cuts up into half a dozen ha'porths - the skewers
being given in, though it takes half a ton of them to fix up a day's
consumption. Here is another item for the forest conservation people! 182½
tons of deal used a year in skewering up the horses made into meat by Harrison
Barber!
Sometimes
there is a glut of the aged and the maimed, and the supply of meat exceeds the
demand. To cope with this difficulty a complete refrigerating plant is at work
at Wandsworth, cooling the larders, in which two hundred and fifty horses can be
stored; which larders are not only a revelation, but a welcome surprise.
A
door is opened and shut, and we stand in the darkness between two doors in an
air lock; the inner door is opened and a shiver of cold runs through us as a
match is struck and a candle lighted; and there front
is what looks like a deep cave in an arctic drift. Around us are piles of meat,
all hard as stone and glittering with ice crystals; overhead, and at the back [-190-]
of all, the beams and walls are thick with pure clinging snow; and from above
a few flakes fall as the door closes on the silvery cloak that wraps the last to
leave the Horse World of London.
THE END
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