We wonder whether those who sell their worn-out horses for
exportation to France know of the kind of death to which they probably doom them.. A writer signing himself "M. Hadden," and writing from Walton-on-Thames, sends to the papers of last Tuesday this horrible account of the fate which many of them encounter :—" Certain speculators some years ago made artificial swamps on the banks of the Garonne, and filled the swamps with leeches. To be profitable these leeches must multiply themselves by millions; to do this, they must be liberally supplied with food. To thus supply them the Bordelais speculators buy up old and worn-out horses, and drive or drag them into the swamps, which have wooden compartments, so placed that when these unhappy animals have been forced into the mud there is no escape for them. The leeches fasten on them by thousands. The horse is in a few moments black with crawling crea- tures; the blood-suckers fix themselves most of all on the
open wounds and galls The frantic terror of the poor animals is indescribable, as, bleeding from all their sensitive parts, they try vainly to shake off the leeches, but are at last sucked down into the noxious slimes and seen no more. Nearly twenty thousand horses are said to be sacrificed annually in this way at Bordeaux. It has been pointed out that leeches, nourished on diseased horses, are very likely to convey maladies into the human system." Deliberate cruelty of this kind towards one of the most sensitive of domestic animals, seems to us an iniquity of a very grave kind.
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