Black Beauty 1-28

My horse at home on "the farm."

Black Beauty lets us see a little of the intricacies of being a horse bred for work; of being overworked, of drunk and/or abusive owners or trainers, broken families, having one's life risked for trivial affairs, and certainly about what it means to be communicated with but not understood. So, if I had to think back on all of my experience with "work animals" as we call them here, it would be a very long and complicated tale, as well. I've known companions of police dogs, police horses, honest-to-goodness cowboys and the horses that they still depend on in their ranches (remember that I'm from the legitimate "country"), carriage horses here in Austin, etc., and as Black Beauty mentions, I have my mixed views of how they are treated. For there truly are:

" a great many kinds of men; there are good thoughtful men... , that any horse may be proud to serve; and there are bad, cruel men, who never ought to have a horse or dog to call their own. Besides, there are a great many foolish men, vain, ignorant, and careless, who never trouble themselves to think; these spoil more horses than all, just for want of sense; they don't mean it, but they do it for all that..." (Chapter 3)

Some people really seem to get it. Some just don't, even though they may or may not understand or even sympathize with what their non-human companions might be enduring. I mean, I, at home, even, still get into arguments with my dad because my horses don't "earn their keep," as he calls it because they're not being used for what he calls "their job" anymore. He's like York, he:

 might have known, and very likely did know, how that rein harassed me;
but I suppose he took it as a matter of course that it could not be helped;
at any rate, nothing was done to relieve me. (Chapter 23)

Well, that might not be the truth. Now that they have worked together more, they are certainly friends, and he definitely puts their welfare above their practical use. Of course, he is also the same man who told me that I would never get to ride them because they were "work" horses, and I didn't know how to use the saddle and the touch of the bit correctly (i.e. aggressively enough). He ate his words when, by the end of 3 or 4 months, Dixie would meet me 2 miles away from my house at the bus stop every day at 3:30, stand by the fence to wait for me to climb up, and then walk me to the house without a halter or a bit or a stitch of saddle in side. She would slow down or speed up in response to my shifting weight or turn at just the slightest pressure at the touch of her neck. I mean, it is amazing how much of a dialogue you can have if you just try things until you understand each other. I think Black Beauty may have even made that point. I've always like to think that we keep things natural on our property as far as my girls are concerned, then. If it can be done without gadgets, and with body language, so much the better. Even though, apparently not being profitable or productive is a sin in an industrial/ work-ethic driven home (like most of the Western world).

In fact, I was reminded so much of the various relationship humans and animals can have. I think about my brother's big rottweiler who can be so big and powerful and rambunctious when they're wrestling on the floor, but when he is around my niece, he is the most gentle creature in the world. He watches every move he makes and just quietly and gently approaches her so that she can grab onto his nose or tail (or whatever is within reach). And gracious knows that she doesn't communicate in the conventional form of English either.

And animals talk back to us, don't they:

Boys," said he, shaking his mane, "are quite different; they must be broken in as we were broken in when we were colts, and just be taught what's what... Boys, you see, think a horse or pony is like a steam-engine or a thrashing-machine, and can go on as long and as fast as they please; they never think that a pony can get tired, or have any feelings; so as the one who was whipping me could not understand I just rose up on my hind legs and let him slip off behind -- that was all. He mounted me again, and I did the same. Then the other boy got up, and as soon as he began to use his stick I laid him on the grass, and so on, till they were able to understand -- that was all. They are not bad boys; they don't wish to be cruel. I like them very well; but you see I had to give them a lesson."

Now, I don't know if this is how animals really think. Even Black Beauty seems so very human to me that I have a hard time suspending my disbelief. However, it would certainly seem that Anna Sewell spent her fair share of time watching horse mannerisms and thinking about what caused their behavior. She certainly must have considered what it might be like to be separated at the whim of someone else and, ultimately, to live your whole life in service, and that reflection is far more than a lot of us do... at least as adults. If we see a carriage horse in Austin scared from a car passing too closely, we say "poor horse" and keep on walking or driving away, without much thought of how we would be affected. And as kids, we probably (at least hopefully) did our fair share of exploring our imagination and growling or pouncing on people.

Sorry men. My roommate made me add it.

Heaven knows my sister would make my brother eat dog food off of the floor and he would obediently comply, and I spent my fair share of time out on my hands and knees in the grass because I was "a bison, Mommy, look!" right before I would go wallow in the dirt like I had seen them do in the Wichita Mountains just a few days before. Then there's always my middle brother who made my other brother rope him and calf-tie him because he wanted to know what it really felt like. The consensus: it hurt like the dickens! But I feel like somewhere along the way we become overly-intellectual or too caught up in knowing how to survive in "the real world" to care about those things anymore. Come on. There has to be at least one or two (or more) people out there who have read Black Beauty, set it down, and said, "so what! I get it. And..." And it doesn't just stop at animals. We stop caring, or thinking it matters how really anyone else truly looks at the world (because how could we ever know? We're not them. Or even worse, we think it doesn't matter as long as we can still get what we want from them.) 

Now then, this is something that I could not quite understand: how did Black Beauty become such a success? It changed laws. It apparently changed minds and hearts as well. How? Certainly, I would put it in the same vein (as far as design and "in-depthness" goes, as, say, Frederick Douglass's slave narrative, which it reminded me a lot of, actually). But I'm trying to come up with something that would be a comparable today to see how it fares in the market and I can't think of anything contemporary. Are we just not as moved by sympathetic tales anymore, and so we've moved away from them? Do we just feel like it's been done before and has somehow lost its power? Have we, as a society changed? I don't know.Why hasn't there been a writer to come along and provoke so much sentiment that laws get changed for us?

It's worth thinking about.