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A very good reference on the castration of stallions in Roman times with a detailed description of the surgery provides chapter 99 of the Corpus Hippiatricorum
Graecorum (CHG), authored by the famous vet Apsyrtos. Additionally, quite a lot of votive stones donated by or sarcophagi of Roman veterinarians show the castration clamp, the „otolabis“, apparently used as a guild symbol, therefore, and indicating the castration
of stallions as a core activity of the vet job.
Best,
Gerhard
Prof. Gerhard Forstenpointner
Archaeozoology and Comparative Morphology
Institute of Anatomy
University of Veterinary Medicine Vienna
Veterinaerplatz 1
1210 Vienna, AUSTRIA
ph +43 1 25077 2503
+43 1 25077 6332
Fax +43 1 25077 2590
From: Analysis of animal remains from archaeological sites [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
On Behalf Of Cox, John
Sent: Saturday, January 18, 2014 4:51 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: [ZOOARCH] horse castration
I am sorry that the thread on horseshoes has got mixed up with the one on castration, but as for removing ovaries from fillies, it might not be as impossible as Sue Millard implies.
There was a time when female pigs were spayed - ie had their ovaries removed - and I used to possess a pair of speying forceps. I suppose it possible that horses could also be done that
way, but only when they were small enough - hence perhaps the reference to speying fillies at nine days of age. - to be lifted up by the hind legs to get the gut to drop away from the back of the abdomen.
The speying mares had become so common place in France that it had to be banned by Ordinance in 1717 (Fleming, 1881 - Veterinary Journal 12:145ff). Were these mares speyed as young fillies
or as adults? This was before the days of Lister and the concept of antisepsis and before the advent of ether or chloroform for anaesthesia but surgery was performed prior to those days with good levels of recovery - as Gala with her historical references
notes. Surgery could be performed on adults with the mare trussed up and a hand, knife and ecraseur introduced through the vagina - barbaric, I know, but I have a record of a horse who was an abdominal cryptorchid being castrated without anaesthesia in the
early 1800s.
To add to the other ancient references provided by Gala, Aristotle refers to the castration of men, of quadrupeds (male and female) and of birds (Historia Animalium Lib ix, cap 37), Pliny
(exactly where I do not know) refers to the castration of male and female camels and Varro (again I do not know exactly where) goes into some detail about castration, referring to the operation on horse, dog and fowl.
With regard to Simon Davis’ reference to Thomas Tusser (1580, chap 32, January's husbandry) recommendation, "Thy colts for thy saddle geld yoong to be light," it continues “for cart do
not do so if though judgest right”. There is good, though largely anecdotal, evidence that horses castrated as youngsters were not in later life capable of sustained hard work. Whether age at castration affects the appearance of the skeleton for years to
come, I do not know - if anybody knows I would like to know.
John Cox
****************************************
Dr John E Cox FRCVS
16 Cragside View
Rothbury
Northumberland
NE65 7YU
Division of Equine Studies
University of Liverpool
Leahurst
Neston
Wirral
CH64 7TE
From: Analysis of animal remains from archaeological
sites [[log in to unmask]] on behalf of Gala Argent [[log in to unmask]]
Sent: 18 January 2014 00:37
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: [ZOOARCH] horse castration
The first archaeological evidence we have of gelding are the horses buried with their owners in c. 2500 BP within the Pazyryk community where Southern
Siberia, Mongolia, Kazakhstan and China meet. They were frozen in permafrost and preserved along with clothing (both human and horse), tack, and all kinds of organic material not usually seen in burials. In addition to the Pazyryks, the Xiongnu, the Turkic-Mongol
Iron Age people who worried the Chinese at their northern borders, rode mostly geldings, as noted in the Chinese histories. The Classical Greeks had no tradition of gelding, and preferred to ride stallions.
The procedure made it to Europe much later and most likely from Central Asia to Europe. The Magyars (non-Indo-European speaking people of steppe origins
who settled in Hungary), may have been among the first Europeans to geld, around 800 CE. They, like other steppe peoples, rode geldings almost exclusively.
That the technique spread from there is borne out by the various words used to describe it. The French verb meaning “to castrate” is
hongrer, while a gelding is called a hongre—both terms attesting to the origins of the custom, Hungary. In German, a gelding is known as a
Wallach, the technique having been borrowed from the Wallachians (Romanians), no earlier than the days of the Teutonic Order (12th century).
But it apparently didn’t make it into, or more likely wasn’t accepted culturally in, the Iberian Peninsula, where the ability to handle a stallion was
(and still is) appreciated. The Conquistadores all rode stallions, which made populating the New World with horses a difficult issue for the Spanish monarchy, who had to issue proclamations to force mares to be taken along.