Max Kurzweil, A Dear Visitor, 1894, Private Collection, Vienna.

Way back, almost a year ago, Federal News announced that military funerals carrying the casket on the traditional horse-drawn artillery caisson were being suspended temporarily, for just a month and a half, 45 days.

Why?

The cause was absolutely appalling.

The Army will make changes to the long care of its Old Guard horses, including expanding their pastures, allowing them rest and rehabilitation, and purchasing new horses. It also plans to improve the equipment and possibly use lighter caissons to ease the load for the horses. An Army report last year found poor management practices and unsatisfactory sanitation in caring for the caisson horses.

Horses were being overworked, underfed, neglected, used with ill-fitting tack, and actually dying.

That 45-day suspension continued right up to the present day, just about a year later, and the Army has announced that it expects it will be roughly one more year before replacement horses can be purchased and proper equipment and care put into place.

“more than half of the 48-member herd had muscle, joint or hoof issues.”

The original suspension followed a string of military working horse deaths, reports of unsanitary and potentially life-threatening living conditions, as well as congressional scrutiny directed at the Army’s 3rd Infantry Regiment, also known as “The Old Guard” — the service’s premier ceremonial unit, which is in charge of conducting the horse-drawn services. …

Officials could not give an estimate of when that suspension would lift, though Bredenkamp said that the decision to resume operations would be “conditions-based” and did not expect the extension to last multiple years. Those conditions include factors like how many new horses the unit can procure to replace those who have retired, aged out or were adopted.

It also centers around fine-tuning training and rest cycles, which officials said were overburdened before experts and lawmakers leveled scrutiny at the unit. Before April 2023, the caisson horses were doing 6-8 funerals per day, every two hours, according to officials.

“What we’ve learned is that the more appropriate work-rest cycle is no more than five hours under saddle and tack in a day,” Bredenkamp said. “So, that reduces the amount of funerals we can support with those squads.”

In 2022, CNN reported that two horses died within just days of each other and that the herd was living in small, unsanitary conditions, consuming low-quality feed and suffering from parasites. Within nine months of those deaths, two other horses died, totalling four in less than a year.

Following those deaths, the unit started rotating horses to a larger plot of land in Virginia in conjunction with the Bureau of Land Management. One of the challenges that officials and soldiers who care for the horses have grappled with is the lack of organic space at Fort Myer and Fort Belvoir, where the horses live and train. In 2022, the Army said the then-60-member herd was living in less than 20% of the space equine experts recommend.

“It just became very cost-prohibitive to be able to expand the relatively small facility we had at Fort Belvoir to accommodate a larger herd,” Bredenkamp said. “And we’re not going to get any more in Fort Myer.”

Over the last year, the number of horses began to dwindle as some were adopted out of the unit, which meant those remaining had more space as the unit looked for alternatives to the tiny six-acre pasture complex at Belvoir. Two years ago, the herd numbered around 60, which crowded the limited space they occupied at the two bases. Now, the herd totals at 42, which includes 18 new horses since June 2023.

The people in charge of those horses were members of he U.S. Army’s ultra-elite “Old Guard” Third U.S. Infantry Regiment which is used to guard the President of the United States and the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier and for other important ceremonial functions.

Some elite!

Lady & her horse in snowstorm by Félix Thiollier.

From the #EasyFire in Simi Valley – this thoroughbred goes back into the blaze to get his family. Not all heroes wear capes…💪🐎😍 pic.twitter.com/BsU6PlBq8R

— Rex Chapman🏇🏼 (@RexChapman) October 30, 2019

The best example of what was called a Nejdi horse that comes to my mind is ‘Vonolel’–the horse of General Roberts. Here is a letter that General Roberts has written to Homer Davenport in 1907 and a photograph showing Lord Roberts mounted on the Vonolel, c. 1881

“ENGLEMERE, ASCOT, BERKS,
4th March, 1907.
Dear Sir,—I have been a long time replying to your letter of the 22d of November, in which you asked for information about the Arab horse I had in my possession for many years. I have deferred doing so until I could send you a photograph of the horse; this I have been able to discover quite lately. I bought the horse in Bombay in 1877. He was a pure-bred Nedj Arab and was then five years old, and had quite recently been landed from Arabia. The following year I took him to Afghanistan, where he was with me for two years in extremes of heat and cold, and very often with difficulty about proper food for him, but while other horses fell off in condition from not getting forage, the little Arab maintained his throughout. I kept him all the time I was in India and in 1893 brought him to England. He attracted great attention at the late Queen’s jubilee in 1897; he died two years afterward, and is buried in the garden of the Royal Hospital, Dublin, in which I reside while commanding in Ireland. During the twenty-two years he was in my possession he travelled with me over fifty thousand miles and was never sick or sorry. He measured exactly 14 hands 2 inches.
Believe me,
Yours very truly,
ROBERTS, F. M.”

———————–

Kipling’s tribute to Lord Roberts: “Bobs” (an excerpt):

Now they’ve made a bloomin’ Lord
Outer Bobs,
Which was but ’is fair reward—
Weren’t it, Bobs?
So ’e’ll wear a coronet
Where ’is ’elmet used to set;
But we know you won’t forget—
Will yer, Bobs?

———————–

The grave of Vonolel, the famous and bemedalled horse.

Many people walking the grounds of the Royal Hospital in Kilmainham will pass a small grave without noticing, and yet this grave is perhaps the most unusual grave in Dublin itself. In the grounds of the Hospital, one finds the final resting place of ‘Vonolel’, twenty-nine years old on passing, but a veteran of conflict.

Much more information on the horse can be gathered from an earlier piece however, dating from January of the same year, when Vonolel was still living. In it, it was noted that Vonolel had come to England “having been practically all over the world with his master”. He was described as “..a type of the highest class of Arab charger” and it was noted that “he traces his descent from the best blood of the desert.”

From Inside Polo.

The Ardennes Draft Horse is considered one of the oldest breeds of draft horse, and is believed to be a direct descendant of the prehistoric Solutre Horse.

By J. Bottum, from the December 22, 2000 Wall Street Journal:

Late afternoon on Christmas Eve, the year I was eleven, my father took me with him across the river. I can’t remember what the urgency was, but he needed some papers signed by a rancher who lived over on the other side of the Missouri from Pierre. So off we headed, west over the bridge and north through the river hills.

If you’ve never seen that South Dakota country in winter, you have no idea how desolate land can be. I once asked my grandmother why her grandfather had decided to stop his wagon-trek in what became the town where she was born. And she answered, in surprise that I didn’t know, “Because that’s where the tree was.”

Nice story RTWT.

Ben Maher of Great Britian on Alfredo during Day 2 of the 79th German Dressage and Jumping Derby 2008 at Klein Flottbek Derby Park on May 02, 2008 in Hamburg, Germany.

When there’s no turning back.

Unhappy landing for the rider. Horse was fine.

A video featuring the two stars of the DIRECTV Commercials:

The Tin Man out with the Worcestershire Foxhounds

Hat tip to Karen L. Myers.