India in 1887 as seen by Robert Wallace / [Robert Wallace].

  • Robert Wallace
Date:
1888
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: India in 1887 as seen by Robert Wallace / [Robert Wallace]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    188/550 (page 102)
    More than half of the bullocks were over ten years of age, ranging up to seventeen years. Many of the larger ones, used for artillery purposes, were bred or selected with their parts altogether out of proportion, and such as to be really incompatible with hard work or endurance. Height is an immense disadvantage to a bullock if it does not carry a proportionate share of strength with it. I hough some of the large specimens were in good con- dition as regards fat, yet there was a decided want of muscular development of a hard and useful sort. The muscles had got flabby or atrophied from want of exer- cise. Any one who has gone in for athletics and for hard training of wind and limb will fully understand me when l say, that a bullock kept dawdling with a half empty military cart along a few miles of level road per day, and never employed at real good hard work, must be most cruelly disappointing when put to a severe test, such as a march of a month’s duration across country, in Afghanistan, on short rations. A bullock does not come into the world a born worker. It has got to learn to work quite as much as a blacksmith has got to learn to shoe a horse ; and like the muscles of the blacksmith’s arms, the muscles of the bullock must be developed by exercise, and kept in training and good order by frequent practice extending over years, and going back to a time when the natural youthful growth of the frame was not fully completed. The part which bears the burden, in this case the neck, must be well tanned by years of patient labour to prevent abrasion of the skin (yoke-gall), swelling, and abscesses, which result when animals arc rushed into full work without the necessary preparation for it. A distinct parallel is to be seen in the soft and easily blistered condition of the palm of a man who holds a pen in an office, as compared with that of the hand which daily wields a forge hammer, or that of the “horny-handed son of husbandry ” who holds the plough.