Cart Horse Research Articles

Economic Contribution of Cart Horses to the Livelihoods of Families in Gondar Town Ethiopia

Equines are providing traction power and transport services, like pulling cart, packing and riding, at low cost in both rural and urban areas of Ethiopia. A cross-sectional study was conducted in Gondar city from November 2014 to April 2015 to assess major health problems and to investigate the economic contribution of cart horses to livelihood of the community. Cart horses were randomly selected from the study area. Observational study was also conducted and semi-structured questionnaire survey was administered to all cart horse owners. The study revealed that behavioral responses, skin coat and dental conditions were significantly associated with body condition and age of cart horses (p<0.05). Wound and musculoskeletal problem had no significant association with body condition and age of working horses. Young horses with good body conditions were more prone to wounds (75%) than the older horses with poor body conditions. The majority of the carthorse owners used their horses for transportation for long hours (> 8 hours) per a day, 5-6 days per week and loaded them 500-700 kg. The income in cash for the cart horse owners was recorded as 80-100 ETB per day. The current study indicated that the cart horse contribution to livelihood of communities is considerable. The working animals deserve better husbandry and veterinary care to sustain their contribution. We suggest a more detailed and systematic study be conducted in the study area to influence policy makers towards better regulation in animal welfare.
 Keywords: Cart horses, Economic contribution, Gondar, Ethiopia.

Socio-economic impacts of working horses in urban and peri-urban areas of the Cape Flats, South Africa.

In the Cape Flats townships, Cape Town, South Africa, there are more than 250 working cart horses. They serve the community with scrap metal and garden refuse removal, human transport and the selling of goods. A questionnaire was undertaken to understand the social and economic impacts of a horse and cart in the Cape Flats on individual owners and/or drivers, their households and the community. A mixture of classical quantitative questions combined with qualitative participatory technique questions were used. A total of 100 participants took part in the questionnaire, who cart with 163 horses between them. The majority (89%) identified the cart horse income as their primary income source. Apart from the participants, an additional 716 people were supported financially through this income, where the mean number of children supported was 2.9 (95% confidence interval [CI]: ±0.42) per interviewed participant. Scrap metal transportation was the most common work and the season (winter) had a negative impact on their ability to work. The spatial extent to which a cart horses work was determined and related back to the impact on the horse and participant of the survey. It was demonstrated that the cart horse industry had an impact not only on those who worked in the industry, but also on the surrounding residents, either through their work or through supporting others with their income. This study revealed that the concepts of ‘One Health’ and ‘Health in Social-Ecological Systems’, in action as horse and human health within the Cape Flats are closely intertwined.

Anthelmintic Resistance of Strongyle Nematodes to Ivermectin and Fenbendazole on Cart Horses in Gondar, Northwest Ethiopia.

A study was conducted from November 2015 to April 2016 to determine fenbendazole and ivermectin resistance status of intestinal nematodes of cart horses in Gondar, Northwest Ethiopia. Forty-five strongyle infected animals were used for this study. The animals were randomly allocated into three groups (15 horses per group). Group I was treated with fenbendazole and Group II with ivermectin and Group III was left untreated. Faecal samples were collected from each cart horse before and after treatment. Accordingly, the reduction in the mean fecal egg count at fourteen days of treatment for ivermectin and fenbendazole was 97.25% and 79.4%, respectively. It was significantly different in net egg count between treatment and control groups after treatment. From the study, resistance level was determined for fenbendazole and suspected for ivermectin. In addition, a questionnaire survey was also conducted on 90 selected cart owners to assess their perception on anthelmintics. In the survey, the most available drugs in the study area used by the owners were fenbendazole and ivermectin. Most respondents have no knowledge about drug management techniques. Hence, animal health extension services to create awareness regarding anthelmintic management that plays a key role in reducing the anthelmintic resistance parasites.

Circulating serovars of Leptospira in cart horses of central and southern Ethiopia and associated risk factors

Little work has been done on diseases of horses in Ethiopia or tropical regions of the world. Yet, Ethiopia has the largest horse population in Africa and their horses play a pivotal role in their economy as traction animals. A serological and questionnaire survey was therefore conducted to determine the circulating serovars of Leptospira and their association with potential risk factors in the cart horse population of Central and Southern Ethiopia. A total of 184 out of 418 cart horses from 13 districts had antibody titres of 1:100 or greater to at least one of 16 serovars of Leptospira species in Central and Southern Ethiopian horses. A significantly higher seropositivity (62.1%) was noted in horses from the highland agroecology followed by midland (44.4%) and lowland (39.8%). Serovar Bratislava (34.5%) was the predominant serovar followed by serovars Djasiman (9.8%), Topaz (5.98%) and Pomona (5.3%). Age and location proved to be associated with seropositive horses with older horses being more commonly affected and the districts of Ziway (Batu) (Apparent Prevalence (AP)=65.5%), Shashemene (AP=48.3%) and Sebeta (AP=41.4%) having the highest prevalence. Multivariable logistic regression found risk factors significantly associated with Leptospira seropositive horses were drinking river water (OR=2.8) and horses 7–12 years old (OR=5) and risk factors specifically associated with serovar Bratislava seropositive horses were drinking river water (OR=2.5), horses ≥13 years (OR=3.5) and the presence of dogs in adjacent neighbouring properties (OR=0.3). Dogs had a protective effect against seropositivity to serovars Bratislava and Djasiman, which may be due to their ability to control rodents. The high seroprevalence confirm that leptospirosis is endemic among horses of Central and Southern Ethiopia. The predominance of serovar Bratislava supports the idea that serovar Bratislava may be adapted to and maintained by the horse population of Central and Southern Ethiopia. This study emphasizes the need for further countrywide serological surveys and isolation of circulating leptospires in animals and humans in order to understand the role of horses in the epidemiology of this disease.

The Effect of Combretum molle Seed Extracts on the Growth of the Mycelial Form of Histoplasma capsulatum Var Farciminosum-an In Vitro Trial

Epizootic lymphangitis (EL) compromises the welfare of working horses and has a serious negative impact on the livelihoods of cart horse owners/drivers in the affected parts of Ethiopia. Unfortunately, antifungal drugs for the treatment of EL are unavailable in both private and government clinics. The spread of multidrug-resistant strains of fungi motivates to discover new classes of antifungal compounds that inhibit these resistant strains. Therapeutic alternative compounds, particularly those isolated from plants have shown promising empirical effect on different fungal strains, which are unresponsive to chemical anti fungi drugs. Histoplasma capsulatum var farciminosum obtained from Aklilu Lema Institue of Patho Biology (ALIPB) was used as test organism. Agar dilution assay was performed to evaluate the inhibitory effect of Combretum molle seed extract and to measure the minimum inhibitory concentration (MIC). Ketaconazole was used as a positive control. Combretum molle seed extracts inhibit the growth of HCF up to 0.0156%. Hydrolysable tannins have a great potential in inhibition of fungal growth. In case of topical application, tannins have haemostatic effect and wound closure property

On behalf of tradition: An analysis of medical student and physician beliefs on how anatomy should be taught.

Human anatomy, one of the basic medical sciences, is a time-honored discipline. As such, it is taught using traditional methods, cadaveric dissection chief among them. Medical imaging has recently gained popularity as a teaching method in anatomy courses. In light of a general tendency to reduce course hours, this has resulted in a decrease of dissection time and intense debates between traditional and modern approaches to anatomy teaching. In an attempt to explore trends in the attitudes of medical professionals toward the various methods of anatomy teaching, medical imaging in particular, the authors constructed a questionnaire and conducted a nationwide survey among medical students (in all stages at medical school), residents, and specialists in all fields of medicine. The survey results demonstrated indisputable appreciation of traditional methods of anatomy teaching, particularly cadaveric dissection, and showed that specialists believe significantly more strongly than clinical or preclinical students that anatomy and medical imaging should be taught separately. Strong correlations among the components of the traditional approach to anatomy instruction were also found. In light of the results, it was recommended that imaging should be incorporated into anatomy courses with caution, and, as far as possible, not at the expense of dissection time. It was advised that medical imaging has to be taught as a separate course, parallel to a traditional anatomy course. This will allow anatomical principles to be appreciated, which in turn will serve the students when they study radiology. "And we proceed in the following order: in front walks Nikolai with the slides or atlases, I come after him, and after me, his head humbly lowered, strides the cart horse; or else, if necessary, a cadaver is carried in first, after the cadaver walks Nikolai, and so on. At my appearance, the students rise, then sit down, and the murmur of the sea suddenly grows still. Calm ensues." -From "A Boring Story: From the Notebook of an Old Man" by Anton Chekhov.

Vignettes and Vines: Faster Seeing

The cult of the future (of faster and faster seeing) alternates with the wish to return to a more artisanal, purer past--when images still had a handmade quality, aura. Susan Sontag On Photography One of Thomas Bewicic's engravings, Jane Bewick Pulling Hair from a Horse's Tail (A General History of Quadrupeds [1792]), shows at centre a large cart horse, its tail being pulled by a young child, while a woman (her mother or nursemaid) appears in the upper right background running over a stile by a cottage toward the impending disaster. At the left side of the picture, two lovers are heading off into a small forest, their relationship paralleled by the two horses in the far left middle ground. Thus this vignette (which OED defines as an ornamental or decorative design on a blank space in a book or among printed matter, esp. at the beginning or end of a chapter or other division, usually one of small size or occupying a small proportion of the space; spec. any embellishment, illustration, or picture uninclosed in a border, or having the edges shading off into the surrounding paper; a head-piece or tail-piece [1751]) incorporates a narrative, becoming a miniature version of the normally much larger story-picture or genre painting. The engraving has a handmade, authentic quality, yet it is in fact one of countless reproductions, made possible first by Bewick's innovative use of the hard end grain of boxwood for engraving. Technological change makes seeing faster by effecting the wider dissemination of images. Is this development in itself evil? Or is it the inevitable result of our collective impulse to transmit art to ever-increasing numbers of viewers? In considering these questions, I thought of two historically and generically different art forms and how these two forms might be said both to fulfill this wish and yet, ironically, to express the unfulfillable, elegiac desire to fix time. The first is the vignette and the second is the Vine. Vines are six-second looping videos that anyone can produce and upload to the Internet via the website Vine: they are prodigiously popular. By August 2014, Vine boasted over 100 million viewers each month, with Vine loops playing over a billion times per day (Honan). Like vignettes, Vines are elliptical, often humorous, and usually narrative in form: many are fragmentary sketches or recorded moments featuring one or more performers; others are more complex. As in the Bewick engraving, some Vines develop a narrative to which the viewer, via the loop, returns repeatedly in order to play out the story to its more or less satisfying conclusion. As Susan Sontag has said, Cameras miniaturize experience, transform history into spectacle (109-10). More than most media, Vines radically miniaturize experience, transforming ordinary daily events into spectacle. Olan Rogers's Vine Lost Keys uses six one-second shots to dramatize loss and recovery: shot one, we see Rogers standing in a room in obviously suburban house and asking Where are my keys? Two, we see him, his back to the camera, in another room, throwing cardboard boxes. Three, we see him throwing up his arms in a hallway, screaming, in front of a door. Four, he appears beating his right fist against the door frame. Five, we see him in a backyard at a distance, again raising then dropping his arms. Six, he is sitting on a doorstep outside when he opens his left hand and sees the keys. …

Trauma and sympathy in Buck

Horses and people have long had a special relationship. From the caves of Chauvet and Lascaux to the Great Plains of North America, from cart horse to polo pony, from Equus (1973, Shaffer) to Warho...

Anthroprosthesis, or Prosthetic Dogs

Anthroprosthesis, or Prosthetic Dogs Ivan Kreillkamp (bio) Can a clear distinction be drawn between the human and the nonhuman living creature? From Descartes through Heidegger to Levinas, [End Page 36] modern Western thinkers have struggled to isolate some fundamental capacity—whether speech, thought, awareness of mortality, or capacity for future planning—that distinguishes the human. What seems to be needed here is some term or category that would define the human as separate from, and possessing some priority over, the non-human. The modern anthropological view of culture, for example, may be said to rest "upon the idea of the human symbolic appropriation of nature—whether animate or inanimate" (Ingold 11). This presumption reinforces a more general modern understanding of human beings as creatures who create and shape the environment in which they live by means of the "symbolic appropriation" of the natural world. The human is distinguished from the rest of the living world, then, by a particular kind of use of that world—a formulation that presupposes a stable distinction between the human and a non-human world. The manipulation of tools, traditionally if mistakenly understood to belong exclusively to humanity, offers one iconic instance of such appropriation or use. A tool allows an exertion of human powers, powers that in the first order manipulate the non-human world and in the second order demonstrate and anchor the human/non-human distinction. Tools do not simply define the human and its difference from the non-human or the animal, but extend the human's reach, both literally and conceptually. From the first tools used to, say, throw a stone farther than one could with one's arm alone, human beings have created a world of technologies generating the effect of a prosthesis or extension of the human. "With every tool man is perfecting his own organs," Sigmund Freud observed in an oft-cited passage from Civilization and Its Discontents. "By means of spectacles he corrects defects in the lens of his own eye; by means of the telescope he sees into the far distance.... Man has, as it were, become a kind of prosthetic god" (43-44). Several scholars of Victorian literature and culture have recently argued that nineteenth-century Britain might be understood as a thoroughly prosthetic age.1 Here, I am interested in the particular function and meaning of animals as and in relation to prostheses. Animals tend to be overlooked in considerations of prostheses, which are typically understood as thoroughly mechanical-industrial: tools, devices, machines. But we "use" animals as tools and prostheses as surely as we do mechanical objects, whether in the form of tools made from an animal (a leather belt or shoe, a wool coat) or in the use of labouring animals (a cart horse, a guide dog). Any of these can be understood as what I will call "anthro-prosthetic" tools that extend the human and mark the human being's difference from the animal by incorporating and appropriating the animal in an ongoing, anxious process of defining that difference. I am influenced here by Giorgio Agamben's argument that the human is itself constituted by an "anthropological machine ... at work in our culture" (37) that continually dispels the nonhuman or animal from the human, which is in fact defined by that segregating gesture. What I am calling "anthroprosthesis" is, then, the process by which human beings use animals in order to define the non-animality of the human. [End Page 37] If we think more broadly about the history of human relations with animals and of human domestication of certain species, we can see how a prosthetic logic operates here as well. What is the sheep, the cow, or the dog in its domestication but a projection or extension of human desires and needs? This is most obvious in the human use of substances like wool or leather, but is no less evident in the broader manipulation of animal species to serve human needs; in this light, all breeds of domesticated animals, so fundamentally shaped by human beings, are themselves prostheses.2 I want to suggest, then, that while Freud decreed that in the modern period, humanity had "become a...

EMPREGO DA FISIOTERAPIA EM EQÜINOS COM PARALISIA FACIAL

Facial paralysis is an injury that assaults horses, not very unusual in veterinary. It occurs mainly because of direct or indirect traumas over the facial nerve, that goes over the masseter muscle, having only skin an tissue to protect it. Paralyses are common in cases of compression because of the contention of the animal head on the ground. This work reports the case of a PSI mare with four years, that was taken care of in the Veterinarian Hospital of the Veterinary School of the Federal University of Goias, presenting signs of facial nerve injury; and a cart horse that was taken care at Racecourse of the Pond of Jockey Club of Goias, with 10 years, debilitated and having facial habronemiasis. These animals received therapy physical, using cinesiotherapy and electrical stimulation, for 60 days, obtaining a satisfactory effect like improve of the left facial muscle, return to symmetrical the left nostril, discreet ptosis in the underling lip, normalization of the action to feed and improve of the facial esthetics. Conclu ding that therapy physical was a efficient method of treatment injuries in the facial nerve, like compression, helping in the return of the disturbs of muscle function and to the welfare of these animals. Key words: A nimal, cinesiotherapy, electrical stimulation, neurology, rehabilitation.

The Origin of the Thoroughbred Horse

THE author said that he had shown Academy, January, 1891, (p. 91) that not only, as had been long observed, did the Homeric Greeks drive the horse before they rode him, but that the same was true of all ancient peoples-Egyptians, Canaanites, Assyrians, Aryans of Rig-Veda, Umbrians, Celts-and that the explanation of this was given by Herodotus (v. 9), who, in speaking of the Sigynnæ, the only tribe north of the Danube, whose name he knew, said that they had small horses, with large flat noses and very long hair, which, though not able to carry a man, were excellent under chariots: “wherefore they; used chariots.” Dio Cassius likewise says that the Britons used chariots in war, because their horses were small though active. The description of the horses of the Sigynnse tallies exactly with the abundant remains of the primitive horse of Europe, eaten if great quantities and delineated on antlers by the men of the Stone Age. He was a small animal about 10 hands high with a big head. Even after domestication he remained veryi small, as witness bits of bronze and horn found in Swiss lake dwellings, the shoes found at Silchester, and in camps on the Roman Wall, &c. Authorities are agreed that from this primitive horse has been developed the cart horses of the continent and these islands, whilst our blood horses have come from an eastern stock of slight build and smart appearance. Our problem is to ascertain the original habitat of this superior horse. He has not come from upper Asia; as the Mongolian pony is taken as the type of the coarse thickset horse from which sprang the cart horse. The Mongolian pony probably represents the Scythian horses, which continued to be of a small size down to Strabo's time, and they were derived either from he tarpan or Prezevalsky's horse. The Mongolian pony, though surefooted and enduring, is slow of pace. Neither China, Siam nor Burmah have any indigenous horse answering to the blood horse. India could never breed horses, says Marco Polo, in whose time India was supplied either with Mongolian ponies, from Yunnan or with Arabs from south Persia, Aden and other Arabian ports. These Arabs fetched enormous prices, equivalent to 200l. It has hitherto been universally held that Arabia is the original home of the blood horse. This is a baseless assumption. In the Old Testament, the Arabs are never mentioned as riding anything but camels and asses. Though the author of Job knew of the war horse, yet Job did not own 3. single horse, his equine possessions consisting of 500 she asses. Herodotus (vii. 87) enumerates the nations (including the Libyans) that supplied cavalry to Xerxes' host, but the Arabs only furnish a camel corps. Agatharchides (cited by Strabo) describes the Arabs as camel keepers.