Horse Casualties - Cavalry Divisions
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by
LouBarson1
How do we note horse casualties that have been disclosed in the records /diaries? Do we included them using the drop down box for casualties or is that just for people? Given the number of horses that perished in WW1 ( and WW2) I think they should be recorded/
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The Casualty List is just for people - see comment last 2 lines* This may help: A discussion a year ago: How do I record horses? See discussion Link:
https://talk.operationwardiary.org/#/boards/BWD000000h/discussions/DWD0000xdaThese are the horse tags on the What to Tag List.
#horsescasualties - horses killed or injured through enemy activity or friendly fire.
#horsescondition - to cover remarks such as fit and well, very tired, exhausted, state of horseshoes, etc.
#horsesevacuated - mention of horses being evacuated either due to enemy activity or through illness, etc. Don't use this tag for Veterinary units, as entraining horses back to base was something they did all the time.
#horsesinfection - to cover illness and disease
#horsespurchase - any mention of the buying and selling of horses
#horsesrations - out-of-the-ordinary mentions of feed, e.g. 'Hay ration was reduced to 10 pounds'
#horsesremounts - use this in a similar way as the #draft tag to indicate the arrival of a group of replacement horses, generally only use for groups of a significant size, e.g. 50 horses or more.
Also a query answered by Heather C. Moderator. 2 years ago: ... *You don't use the standard casualties tag for horses at all - it's for people. That's why we started the various horse hashtags because otherwise we have no way at all of tagging horse casualties...
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There is an Interesting link re horse casualties WW1.
https://www.google.co.uk/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&rlz=1C1DSGL_enGB426GB426&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#q=How+many+horse+casualties+in+ww1
..Also Equine casualties was shocking. On just one day during the Battle of Verdun in 1916, 7000 horses were killed by shelling. By 1917, Britain had over a million horses in service and by the time the war was over, Britain alone had lost 484,000 horses. But in total, over 8 million horses perished during the war...
..Veterinary hospitals were set up to help horses recover from shell shock and battle wounds. British Army Veterinary Corps hospitals treated 725,216 horses over the course of the war, successfully healing at least 529,064.
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by
cyngast
moderator
in response to LouBarson1's comment.
Sorry I missed your question yesterday. I'm glad Marie was able to give you a good answer.
The project was originally set up to record only people, but once it got started, our volunteers clamored for a way to record what happened to the horses, so the hashtags Marie posted were created. They cover most of the situations in which horses are mentioned in the diaries. As with many of our hashtags, a short note of explanation, just as you added on the page here, can be helpful to researchers. This is particularly true for numbers of casualties, both killed and wounded, and types of illnesses or infections.
Note that the hashtags are all set up to be plural, because most notations involve more than one horse. We prefer that you use that format, even it the notation refers to a single horse, because it makes searching more efficient if all the hashtags are identical. You can specify that it's just one horse with a comment.
Tagging veterinary sections can be tricky. For one thing, they are usually written by the commanding officer and often record what HE did, rather than what the unit did. Also, many of the activity tags just don't apply for the routine activities of a veterinary section. I find I end up using Other a lot!
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