A blind horse in harness:

Kanpur (India) is a city where it is just a common feature to come across horse driven carts, carriages or coaches. Yakka wallas (a single horse driven coach), and so are thela wallas (carriers of goods including iron bars for short distances from one place to the other). This city is no more an industrial capital of Uttar Pradesh like it used to be called a long time back, but business houses dealing in iron, cotton goods and coal are still there quite in a big number. It’s a common scene to see buffalos and horses harnessed to the carriages and carriers transporting heavy loads of goods from one shop to another. These buffalos and horses are mercilessly beaten up by their masters repeatedly with the use of crude whips to pick-up speed unmindful of as to what a colossal amount of cruelty they are causing to the animals.

I saw a horse driven carriage full of load moving through a traffic jam. Traffic jams in Kanpur city are of a worst order. To my surprise, the horse was a blind one. He was just unable to manoeuvre his sides in the thick jam with the result that every time he tried to guess his direction he clashed himself against something or the other, and every time his guess failed, he got a rough beating by his master, who used an iron bar for the purpose. The horse, at one stage, fell down to an otherwise much sloppy a ground as it was the down side of a fly-over. But for the rescue efforts made by some men in the jam, the horse escaped from being crushed by the vehicles in the jam just by a hair’s breadth. The driver of the cart was still cursing his horse only. Where are the men and organisations, who continuously keep their drums beating on cruelty against animals?

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