THE LAND OF PAIN
Although by no means a nervous person or one so dotingly fond of animals
that he exaggerates every little evidence of ill treatment, I have ever
taken a keen interest in animal welfare, and what I have seen during
my stay of nearly two years in South America has led me to look upon
some of these Latin Republics as almost incredible hells of suffering
for the so-called “lower animals.” I am much tempted here to write a
general chapter on the subject, covering my observations not only in the
Argentine and in Uruguay, but in Chili, Bolivia, Peru, and elsewhere, for
it is remarkable to what an extraordinary extent the various republics
differ in the treatment of animals. The Chilians, for instance, are
moderately careful of their horses, incomparably the finest in South
America, while dogs are allowed to multiply like so much vermin, and
throughout the country hundreds may be seen short of a leg! The Indians,
on the other hand, and especially those of Bolivia, treat horses with
gentleness and seem on the friendliest of terms with their dogs, while
even the large troops of llamas, the burden bearers of the Bolivian
plateau, are handled with no evidence of brutality. In the Argentine,
however, horse and mule and dog are the subjects of such indiscriminate
cruelty that it will be sufficient if I confine myself to recording a few
of the instances seen by me and others that were matter of common report
during my stay. For of all the republics mentioned, the Argentine is most
deserving of the title wherewith I have headed this chapter, noticeable
improvement in the treatment of animals being evident in Uruguay.
It is difficult to explain why the mere crossing of a river should
produce a change in human character, yet I assert that the lot of man’s
friend, the horse, is far happier in Uruguay than in the Argentine. It
may be that the Uruguay horse is of better quality, better fed, and so
fitter for service, thus saving the driver from the need of thrashing it
soundly and incessantly every journey it makes. But I am not so sure of
this, for I have seen Argentine drivers maltreating fine, spirited horses
just as severely as the broken-kneed and spavined jades so commonly seen
between the shafts.
Or perhaps it is something of a local habit, originating, it may be, in
the inferior quality of the horseflesh. Conceivably, a driver who has
only found it possible to make his horse go by thrashing, becomes so
habituated to the act of thrashing, that every horse coming under his
hands will receive like treatment, merely from long practice and not from
necessity. Be the reasons what they may, the facts I deem it my duty to
set down are incontestable.
As a lover of dogs, I was particularly interested in watching their
treatment in Buenos Ayres, and I am not ashamed to confess that sights
which I saw there haunted me for days, and still remain indelibly
impressed on my memory. First, let me explain the admirable system of
the municipality for cleaning the city of all stray curs. A branch of
the sanitary department maintains several wagons which every day visit
different districts. Each wagon is attended by an employee in addition
to the driver,—an expert in the art of throwing the lasso, in which the
Argentine gaucho is unrivalled. So afraid are these brave fellows of
being bitten in the attempt to capture some poor diseased or dying dog
which ought to be destroyed, that they lasso them in the public streets,
and, thus secured, chuck them into the wagon. The dogs are then supposed
to be taken to a general depot to be put out of existence as painlessly,
we should hope, as possible.
Now this, on the face of it, is no bad scheme for ridding the city of
canine undesirables, and every humanitarian should applaud it, in so far
as it reduced the stray dogs, nearly all which are diseased, having for
that reason been turned adrift by heartless owners. But, unfortunately,
the able official with the lasso never thinks of capturing a stray dog,
or a dog it would be a kindness to kill. He has a far more profitable
game to play. His attention is devoted to lassoing the very best dogs he
can see, whose owners will then have to go to the depot and pay anything
from one to five dollars, according to the mood of the gentleman in
charge, to have their animals returned!
[Illustration: PLAZA INDEPENDENCIA, MONTEVIDEO.
The central building in the background is the Government House, or
official residence of the President.]
[Illustration: THE PLAZA LIBERTAD, OR CAGANCHA, MONTEVIDEO.]
The audacity of these official ruffians knows no limits. A lady of
our acquaintance was out driving with her little daughter in their
private carriage one afternoon and had allowed their pet Pomeranian to
take a little exercise by running on the sidewalk beside the carriage.
Suddenly the daughter heard the children in the street shouting that
the dog-catchers were coming—for it is to the credit of the youngsters
everywhere that they run ahead of the dog-catching van to warn people to
secure their dogs—and, stopping the carriage, she leapt to the pavement
to secure her pet, but in the very act of lifting it, the dog was lassoed
and torn from her grasp. No appeal to the policeman at the corner could
restore it to her, until that evening when her father could attend at the
depot and go through the usual formalities and part with the usual bribe.
This disgusting abuse of a most necessary sanitary measure leads Buenos
Ayres to be overrun with mangy curs, some of which, as I remember them,
were more like horrid creatures of a nightmare than “the companion
of man.” In particular I recall a large Borzoi, from which, owing to
starvation and disease, every single hair had departed. Its back was
arched like a bow pulled taut, and its legs, once so straight and
handsome, were bent and pithless. Yet this poor brute, an object of
pitiful horror, with its red-rimmed, mournful eyes, looking reproachfully
at the passers-by, was to be seen slinking about the crowded and
congested thoroughfares day after day. This creature, which was not an
old dog, and perhaps had been as handsome as those rendered popular in
England by Queen Alexandra’s affection for the breed, had probably been
lost to his original owners, and months of wandering and starving must
have elapsed to bring him into the appalling state in which I saw him.
Seldom was an eye of pity bent upon him; nay, I have seen boys kicking
him with the full approval of the policeman.
Another I recall, in much the same condition, had been at one time a
fashionable French poodle of the large black variety, but his skin, to
which only a few scraps of hair still adhered, was a mass of sores, his
ribs so prominent that they threatened to cut through, and the animal
altogether so exhausted that as he walked along the busy pavements of
Maipú, he had every now and again to sit down and lean against the wall.
Yet another, I noticed on a wet and bitter winter day. It was a little
silky spaniel, and my attention was attracted to him making efforts to
jump on the step at the door of a grocer’s shop. He fell back several
times in trying this, and then I noticed that one of his hind legs had
been cut off a little above the foot, and the same accident had evidently
sliced off a portion of his tail. He had thus a bad start for the jump,
but when I came nearer I found a bright little boy inside the shop door
who had evidently kicked the little dog each time it jumped up, and
presently it continued on its hopeless way along the Calle Viamonte.
The happiest dogs I saw in Buenos Ayres were those lying dead in the
gutter. Every day dogs are killed or maimed by the reckless motor cars,
as there is no room for them to run freely on the pavement, and still
less for them in the roadway. It is little short of a crime to allow a
dog to be at large in Buenos Ayres, yet so perverse is fate that such
creatures as I have just described, maimed and diseased, linger on
unkilled, while healthy animals, probably well cared for, meet swift fate
beneath some of the myriad motor wheels.
Withal I would not have you suppose the Argentine is essentially and
invariably cruel to his dog. It is the weakness of all Latin races
either to be too cruel or too kind. There are many dogs in Buenos
Ayres that suffer more from kindness than from cruelty, just as an
Argentine who takes a real interest in his horses will probably spoil
them by over-feeding and under-working. That well-balanced average
of good treatment which, on the whole, is more characteristic of the
Anglo-Saxons than of the Latins, is lacking. At bottom we find the old
innate carelessness and indifference of the race. On one occasion I went
to inspect a large number of dogs and puppies for sale in a well-known
mart in the Calle San Martín. Among a group of some ten or twelve
beautiful terrier puppies, was one in a very bad state of distemper.
The attendants of the place were either too ignorant of the fact, or so
utterly indifferent, that they were making not the slightest effort to
prevent the whole group from developing that highly contagious fever.
There must be, I think, a considerable amount of ignorance to add to the
carelessness, for I was informed by a native that his landlord had that
day sold for fifty pesos a valuable Great Dane because it was developing
rabies! The man was an Italian, and he scouted the suggestion that he had
done anything wrong in getting rid of the dog in that condition. That was
entirely a matter for the purchaser to find out.
In the matter of animal disease, it came with something of a shock to me
to see prize cattle at the Buenos Ayres Agricultural Show suffering from
foot and mouth disease, or _aftosa_, as it is known in the Argentine.
Shall I be believed when I state that prize bulls, so far gone with
the disease that they could scarcely crawl round the paddock, were sold
at auction for substantial sums? Yet when I got to know that it is the
custom in South America to nurse the animals affected by this fever back
to health, and that those sold in that condition were only disposed of
subject to their recovery, I began to wonder why in England they take
such stringent methods of elimination? It is a subject on which I possess
not a particle of expert knowledge, but surely it cannot be right in one
country ruthlessly to destroy every animal that shows signs of foot and
mouth disease, while in another it is possible to sell prize animals
while suffering from it. The explanation of this I must leave to my
bucolic friends.
Turning now to the question of the horse and his treatment, I have from
time to time in preceding chapters been forced to pass some strictures
on this subject, and to mention specific instances. Probably the most
remarkable and suggestive case reported in the press during my stay was
the following: A one-horse coach was passing along one of the narrow
streets to the south of the Avenida de Mayo—Peru, I think—when the
animal fell in the mud, and no efforts of the driver could get it to its
feet again. It was a bitter day of blinding rain, and while the poor
creature lay struggling in the slush, blocking the traffic of the narrow
thoroughfare, it gave birth to a foal. The newcomer was placed in the
coach, the mare eventually raised to her feet and harnessed once more
to the shafts, the driver taking his seat and thrashing her off to the
stables as though nothing unusual had happened! I wonder what the good
folk of the R.S.P.C.A. would have to say to that.
To describe one tithe of the cases of cruelty, either personally
witnessed or coming to my knowledge during my eight months in Buenos
Ayres, would occupy many pages of this book, and I shall limit myself
to one more in particular. It happened in the Calle Bartolomé Mitre,
one of the most congested thoroughfares in the city. It was again a
rainy day, when horses may be seen falling in every street, owing to the
absurd regulation which prohibits the use of heel pieces on their shoes
(perhaps—ye gods!—it is thought these might injure the roads). When I
came on the scene, this horse was lying in a helpless condition on the
asphalt with sand all around him. The sand had been brought so that he
might find a foothold in his struggles to rise, but the poor brute was
far beyond struggling. Everywhere that the harness had touched him he was
marked with raw flesh. Under his collar was a ring of raw flesh around
his neck; the saddle, which had fallen loose from him, disclosed great
patches of bleeding skin; the girths wherever they had touched him, left
bloody traces, and every movement the poor thing made peeled off the skin
where it touched the ground. A more loathsome spectacle of inhumanity I
have not seen. This horse should have been shot months before. His skin
was positively rotten, and in places green-moulded. Yet the little Indian
policeman from the corner was helping the driver to raise the animal to
its feet. This they were attempting by making a loop of the reins around
its neck, the policeman pulling on this with all his might, so that
by partially choking the horse it might be tempted to struggle to its
feet, while the driver stood and thrashed it with his whip in the most
unmerciful manner, every stroke breaking the skin. All to no purpose; it
was too lifeless to struggle, and lay with a mute appeal in its eyes to
be put out of its agony.
I personally protested to the policeman against his endeavouring to raise
the animal, which was clearly past all service, and he frankly told me
to mind my own business, as he was there to get the street cleared. A
young native, however, at this juncture, came along, and seeming the only
person other than myself who was in the least interested in the fate of
the horse, I explained to him what had taken place while I stood there,
and he, producing a card of membership of the Sarmiento Society, which is
endeavouring to sow humanitarianism in the stony soil of the Argentine
nature, insisted that no further effort should be made to raise the
horse by thrashing it or partially choking it, and that it ought to be
destroyed immediately. The policeman was disposed to listen to him, as,
thanks to this society, considerable sums of money have been distributed
among the police in accordance with the number of convictions they have
secured against persons ill-treating animals. When I passed the spot
some hours later, there was only the sand and some clots of blood to be
seen, and I know not what had become of the horse; but the picture of
it, bleeding and hopeless, haunted me for weeks, and remains vivid in my
mind’s eye still.
[Illustration: CATHEDRAL AND PLAZA MATRIZ, MONTEVIDEO.]
[Illustration: PLAZA INDEPENDENCIA AND AVENIDA 18 DE JULIO, MONTEVIDEO.]
I have no wish to harry the feelings of the reader, and I have
personally trained myself to a certain degree of fortitude in looking
upon suffering, for I am not at all sure that the Cæsars who invented and
maintained the Coliseum at Rome chiefly for the purpose of hardening the
populace by familiarising them with bloodshed, were not wise in their
generation. I have no patience with the maudlin sentimentalist or the
ultra-sympathetic person who melts into tears or prepares to faint at the
sight of blood. For such as they, a few months’ wanderings in the streets
of Buenos Ayres would be an admirable training; but for the ordinary man
of feeling, it is a purgatory of pain. Horses innumerable, with diseased,
swollen legs, broken skin, and bleeding fetlocks, are familiar objects of
the streets. To horses in good condition, life during the warmer months
in Buenos Ayres is bad enough, plagued as they are by the myriads of
flies and mosquitoes; but to the poor animals suffering from wounds, no
mind can imagine what their torture is, for these insect pests swarm ever
to the open wounds, and I have seen a horse almost mad with agony from
the clustering flies sucking the blood at an open sore on its body. Sleep
is impossible in the neighbourhood of a cab rank, as through the sultry
night the standing horses will be heard stamping their feet in the most
irritating manner on account of the plaguing insects.
Of course, much of this ill-treatment is due “to want of thought as well
as to want of heart,” and we must not be indiscriminate in denouncing the
Argentine. I have seen, for instance, two fine horses yoked together,
one of them in a state of semi-collapse from high fever, obvious even to
me that has no special knowledge of horseflesh, by its nostrils being
entirely stuffed with yellowish-green matter, while it tried to rest its
fevered head against its yoke-fellow. This, of course, was bad economy,
the one horse most certainly infecting the other, and almost certainly
both of them being doomed to early death. But at the back of it was crass
ignorance and carelessness, the two qualities so eminent in all service
throughout the Argentine.
I recall also a coachman thrashing two horses attached to a heavy wagon,
because they were going so slow. The man was losing his wits with rage
as he madly applied his whip to the poor brutes, who were struggling
and sweating to move the wagon, empty though it was, along the road. I
pointed out to him that he had omitted to undo the chains with which the
wheels were locked. He thereupon jumped down, still in a state of high
dudgeon, undid the chains, and got back again to his seat, and began the
lashing as freely as before, but certainly with better result.
“_La gente aqui ne se fija en nada_” (the people here don’t pay attention
to anything), a Spanish friend of mine was fond of saying. His experience
was precisely the same as my own. Instructions of the most explicit kind,
given for the discharge of some little task, were never by any possible
chance correctly carried out. The person addressed never seemed to take
any intelligent interest in what was being said to him. He nodded with a
confident _Si, señor_, to everything, and comprehended nothing. The sense
of care and attention had not been developed in him. This extraordinary
failing is not characteristic merely of the Argentine, but actually
exists in greater degree in other parts of South America. It explains
much of the apparent apathy to suffering, and the lack of care for the
domestic animals.
I remember we had been but a few days in our apartment at the hotel when,
looking out of a window one morning, I saw a woman in the side street
come to the door and throw a biggish black and white object into the
street. Presently a cart came along, and the horse knocked this object
on to the tram lines. Then came a tram and cut through it; then numerous
other horses and coaches passed over it. Taking my field glasses, I could
make out that it was a large cat, which had evidently died overnight and
was thus disposed of by its mistress. Within a few hours it had been so
pounded out of recognition that by the evening practically nothing of it
remained. This I afterwards found was quite a common method of disposing
of household pets when they had ceased to be, forced upon the people,
perhaps, by the simple fact that few of the dwelling houses have a back
yard, and none have an inch of front space.
Where such indifference to the welfare of men’s animal friends and
helpers exists, humanitarianism is necessarily a plant of slow growth.
That it has been planted, the Sarmiento Society serves to show, and
although nothing whatever can be hoped for from the Church, which is
supremely indifferent to the suffering of the animal world, there are
certain warmer human qualities in the Argentine people which in due
time will triumph over the present era of active brutality and apathy.
Horses are too cheap and food too dear for their lives to be a subject of
solicitude with the Argentines. If these economic conditions were to be
modified in some way, that might also help to a change of feeling.
Best of all would be the passing of some stringent laws, and their
enforcement. For when it has been possible to work such a revolution in
the treatment of animals as we have seen within the last ten years in
Naples, previously notorious for cruelty—a revolution due entirely to the
initiative of the Queen of Italy, who invited the English Society for
the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals to organise the movement there—as
much is possible of achievement in the Argentine. The English newspapers
of Buenos Ayres frequently stand forth as champions of animals’ rights,
and probably a sufficiently strong public opinion may yet be formed on
the subject to remove from the country the stigma which at present it
undoubtedly deserves in the title I have here applied to it.