India's silent victims: the mistreated horses

Blinkered and exhausted, the beasts of burden fight for road space among the screaming blare of New Delhi's Sadar bazar, Asia's largest wholesale market. While the watertankers, trucks, auto-rickshaws, tricycles, buses and cars tussle for passage, the only breathing transportation is fighting for its life.

The horse, unlike the venerated cattle or even the meandering packs of street dogs, is an abused commodity in India's capital, the victim of not only those who also fight for survival on the highways, but also its very keepers and those who seek to remedy its injuries.

Abuse of the beasts that pull passengers and produce, as well the equine animals that work in the brick kilns around New Delhi, has not changed in centuries. The practices are antique and barbaric, from slicing nostrils to supposedly allow improved air flow into the passages, pouring molten oil on to open wounds or even sprinkling shards of glass into the eye.

It would be, to British horse-lovers, a heartbreaking vista, but British horse-lovers are also helping to alleviate the suffering. Among the myriad kiosks of the Sadar bazar can be spotted the distinctive orange T-shirts belonging to employees of The Brooke, the world's biggest veterinary charity for working equines. These men and women provide medication and shelter for horses and, perhaps most significantly, advice for their owners.

A recent ambassador for The Brooke to New Delhi was Jim Culloty, the Irish jockey who partnered Best Mate to three consecutive Cheltenham Gold Cups to earn a place alongside the legendary Arkle. Next week, the horsey set will witness the fittest, most keenly honed and attractive creatures sailing across the postcard of the Cotswolds backdrop as yet another Festival unravels. They would not recognise the equine wretches which have to eke out a far less pampered career in dustier surroundings.

Culloty wandered through the vast sprawl of Sadar and arrived at a point opposite a triumvirate of outlets: Super Shine Gas Stoves, Suraj Dealer In Confectionary (sic) Goods and Gupta Gift and Novelties. What was also new was the Brooke shelter on the other side of the road, where working horses were now allowed sanctuary and watering.

"I know what a real horse should look like because I rode Best Mate," Culloty said. "He was a beautiful specimen of a horse and if he went through any sale as an unbroken four-year-old he would top it. He was perfect. But I don't recognise some of the animals I've seen here as horses.

"The cattle here are well treated, in the same way that we would treat horses back home. But the horses over here are used like machines. Like they don't have personalities or feelings, like they don't feel pain.

"There are still the quacks, 'doctors' who pour boiling oil on wounds and firing [breaking the skin with red hot bars] joints without anaesthetic. They put powdered glass into horses' eyes because they think it's a cure. It's unbelievable.

"I've met a man who has been making a living for 40 years doing things like that. But he's changed jobs and he's a blacksmith now. The Brooke have charmed him round."

If you believe in reincarnation and have to come back as a horse it is perhaps best to do so outside the borders of the subcontinent. In India, cattle and street dogs are more revered. Cows, the most sacred of beasts, have their faces covered in foliage if they fall fatally on the roads, around which they are given the most studious of respect.

The Parsees, who supply perhaps the most successful businessmen in the country, respect the street dogs, who are believed to take away evil from the body if they circle them at burial. Canine corpses, too, are given the honour of being dolled up at the roadside. Horses, though, are just as likely to be beaten around the outside of the thoroughfare shrines.

"People talk about cruelty to racehorses in England and Ireland, but they'd soon understand what cruelty really was if they came here," Culloty said. "I saw one horse who worked seven days a week with this ancient harness which had nails underneath and was cutting into open wounds on his back. He looked like he was 30 and on his last legs, but he was only a young horse.

"In nearly all yards [in England and Ireland] horses are looked after better than the people. They do a bit of exercise every morning and they do the odd 10 minutes of work at the racecourse. Fair enough, that's hard work, but they're fit, they're trained for it and they're prepared. If they get an injury they get the very best of treatment. And, nowadays, most of them are found a good home afterwards and they're spoiled rotten. Over here, if an animal gets a career-ending injury he is not even put out of his misery. They let him go on the streets to starve and die a slow, painful death.

"But change has started because The Brooke not only gives veterinary assistance, but it also educates the local people, tries to change a mindset that is centuries old. Some people warm to the idea, but the ones that don't still have animals in a shocking state.

"I went to a place in the city where The Brooke has been working for six years and the animals were in good condition and that's not just relatively good condition. They were well fed and well cared for.

"People now build shelters for the horses so they can rest out of the sun. They feed them grass that have come from city lawns. You can see the difference. But there has to be diplomacy because you can't march in and tell people what they've been doing for centuries is wrong. It's difficult."

The Brooke motto is "healthy working animals for the world's poorest communities" and the belief is that helping horses helps their owners. Yet a chasm still exists.

Some masters in Delhi continue to believe that if they give a horse a drink, or pour water over its body, it will get a fever. This is the kind of superstition the charity has encountered ever since it was founded by Mrs Dorothy Brooke, the wife of a British army officer, as a last-stop resting place for ex-war horses in a Cairo street in 1934.

Last year, the charity "reached" 33,000 animals in India. That, however, is just a speck of the equine workforce. Across the developing world the charity has intervened to help up to half a million animals, and similar mobile teams are at work in Pakistan.

India's large working population of horses is widely dispersed over this vast country of nearly three million square kilometres. There are herds alone in the thousands of brick kilns around Delhi. In this steaming environment, a donkey is likely to be asked to carry its own bodyweight in bricks in temperatures as high as 50C for up to 12 hours a day. Each donkey travels about 14km every 24 hours, hauling bricks from the manufacturing area to the furnaces.

"The land is not flat so this makes walking with loads very difficult," Dr Valliyate Manilal, a Brooke veterinary officer, says. "By the end of the brick-making season, animals are often lame and exhausted. Many are abandoned and die. The lifespan of a donkey in a brick kiln may be no more than two years."

Yet there are survivors. Dhanee Singh's pony was lying on the ground, exhausted and emaciated at a brick kiln. A Brooke mobile vet found the animal was dehydrated and anaemic. "It had gone off its feed," Dhanee, whose lifeblood depended on his pony transporting bricks to the kilns, said. "A local medicine man gave it a 'magical powder', but it is worse. I didn't know what to do."

A blood test uncovered that the pony was suffering from a potentially fatal parasitic disease. It recovered after a course of drugs and multivitamins.

In another case, New Delhi carriage owner Jaiprakesh was used sharp and painful horse bits on his charges. He relied on the old hocus-pocus until the day his horse, Raja, bolted in traffic and his scalpel bit sliced open his tongue. With blood spewing everywhere, Raja was taken to the local "medicine man", whose methods failed to staunch the flow.

"I've just taken a huge loan to buy him," Jaiprakesh said, as he brought his wounded beast to a Brooke mobile team. "If he dies I will be ruined. How will I feed my family?"

The diagnosis was that Raja had severed an artery and was slowly bleeding to death. He was sedated, the wound sealed and painkillers and antibiotics administered. Jaiprakesh is now a convert and all his horses regularly visit the mobile teams.

There was also Ratan, a 12-year-old cart-horse driver who was crippled by polio since the age of five. "To live you have to work. Without my horse, I would not be able to sell my vegetables, milk or grain," he said. "I've learnt that anyone can work, even people like me. But the one thing you must do is respect your animal and not everyone can do that."

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