World War I: Injured Horses and People

[inmh]

Setting: England, July/Early August of 1914, very beginning of World War I.

Terms Searched: Essentially, I searched for "horses" and "broken legs", "horses" "shooting injured horses", "World War I" got some of what I was looking for: I found articles that discussed how injured/suffering horses were dealt with in WWI and general information on why

Comments

[framlingem]

I'm not medically knowledgeable beyond basic first aid, but for #3, it might help people out to include the context. Has fighting died down? Are there snipers? Are they in a city, in the trenches, on a field?

[inmh]

Whoops- I meant to mention that before! They're on a field, and they haven't left England yet, so no snipers or any other forms of immediate danger nearby.

[poniesandphotos]

It's pretty feasible that a neck injury could happen to a falling horse. I've seen a horse break its own neck before (due to extreme pain of an ongoing collic) where the horse smashed its head against the ground until its neck broke. If the horse was down and unable to get up due to a broken neck and not already dead killing it would be the nicest thing you could do for it. Horse legs are very delicate. They are about as big around as a human's wrist and four of them support a big animal (900-1400lbs for a normal riding horse), so leg injuries are fairly common. Stepping in a hole at speed can and does break legs. Depending on how badly broken immediate euthanasia is often required

[inmh]

*Shivers* That sounds awful. But thank you very much, as it was also very helpful.

[penknife]

Either a broken leg or broken neck would be reason to put a horse down in that era (even today, these are unlikely to be survivable injuries). A WWI-era veterinarian would use a humane killer (the ones used by the British Army are basically specialized pistols) -- here's an article on them. If someone on the spot with a pistol or rifle knows where to shoot, he might well decide there's no point in waiting for a vet and prolonging the horse's suffering.

[inmh]

The person I mean to have doing the shooting does know where to shoot, so that works well. Thank you for that, and also for the link! I didn't know they actually made special pistols for that purpose.

[janewilliams20]

I started wondering as I read this if army farriers would still have carried (and used) axes for this purpose. It seems not, but it turned up some interesting links. Try this
http://theroyalwindsorforum.yuku.com/topic/1036#.UZxkoLW1H3Y for identification numbers on the horse's hooves

[inmh]

Thank you! That helps quite a bit.

[syntinen_laulu]

Nobody would take a blind bit of notice of his concussion unless he showed gross signs of damage - slurred speech, snoring breath, unfocussed eyes, etc. It’s only very recently that the medical profession have started to worry about any and all blows to the head: even in my own 1960s childhood it was taken for granted that even if you had been knocked out cold, if you looked all right when you came round, you were all right. My little brother once fell 20 feet out of a tree and a family friend had to carry his unconscious body back to the house. When he came round he seemed normal though, so my mother (a radiographer by profession) didn’t dream of taking him for a medical examination. (It wasn’t till weeks later that anyone noticed that he’d broken his wrist

[inamac]

I second this. My Grandfather was WW1 cavalry and insisted that I should have got straight back on the horse that threw me after getting a broken collarbone and sprained ankle...

[inmh]

Okay, excellent! Thank you! This is precisely what I was looking for!

[cameoflage]

Less than a decade old? I've heard people's personal anecdotes of being immobilized and hauled off for X-rays by first responders in the mid-1990s and early 2000s, and it was definitely more than a decade ago (somewhere around 2001) that I read in a first-aid book that you should only move an injured person if it's more dangerous to leave them where they are.

I take your general point, but possibly you should adjust your timescale?