Who knew?? I didn’t!
Sadly this experiment was not a success. Forage and fodder are not available on the ice and even a small pony requires a substantial amount of feed.
Here’s one good article:
http://www.lrgaf.org/polar-ponies.htm
There was quite a debate over ponies vs. dogs for this trek. Amundsen used dogs. He started with 50+ and came back with 11. This was planned; he intended to eat the weaker dogs as food for both men and other dogs. There was criticism of him at the time for this practice.
The British found this distasteful but were ready to eat the ponies. Different strokes, I guess.
Amundsen succeeded; Scott made it to the pole but not back home.
G.
I don’t think that expedition went far.
Not sure why they thought bringing herbivores into a plantless environment.
[QUOTE=Guilherme;7780173]
Sadly this experiment was not a success. Forage and fodder are not available on the ice and even a small pony requires a substantial amount of feed.
Here’s one good article:
http://www.lrgaf.org/polar-ponies.htm
There was quite a debate over ponies vs. dogs for this trek. Amundsen used dogs. He started with 50+ and came back with 11. This was planned; he intended to eat the weaker dogs as food for both men and other dogs. There was criticism of him at the time for this practice.
The British found this distasteful but were ready to eat the ponies. Different strokes, I guess.
Amundsen succeeded; Scott made it to the pole but not back home.
G.[/QUOTE]
If that is the story I remember, they decided on ponies because it was more meat on the hoof than dogs.
They intended to eat them, just as the romans did when they went on their conquests, taking live animals along to supplement what they found to eat along the way.
The ponies didn’t get far. It was of course a very daft idea to bring ponies, which not only couldn’t graze, but they would posthole in the snow. The decision to bring them was not so much based on rational ideas like ponies had more meat, but the prejudices of Scott and his backers, the guys in charge of the Royal Geographical Society, and their opinions of British superiority in everything. Scott would not have thought that another culture, Norwegians, Inuits, anyone, had a more efficacious method of doing things like Arctic travel than the plucky Brits. More importantly, the British expedition had never figured out how to handle or work with the dogs. Typical of Scott, instead of finding people who were dog experts (like Amundsen did) and learning from them, he just assumed that dogs weren’t very good and would not work.
However, in spite of numerous setbacks and SNAFUs, Scott’s expedition made it all the way to the pole, manhauling the sleds after the ponies died, so for most of the journey. It was just that they didn’t make it all the way back. Scott and the four guys who got to the pole with him all died on the return journey.
For a first hand account of Scott’s expedition, Apsley Cherry-Garrard’s “The Worst Journey in the World” cannot be beat. A cracker of a book.
I knew! …because I am almost done reading "The South Pole Ponies " by Theodore Mason.
Good read with many historical photos. Those ponies sure sounded like a handful!
From the book, it sounds like they chose ponies for their pulling powers to help drag 800 lbs sleds. And no, it did not go so well…
PS : thanks for the link to those photos Mike, they complement the book well. Some document the stables and some the bales of fodder for the ponies.
According to Cherry-Garrard and others, the guy who Scott sent to Russia to acquire the ponies knew very little about horses, and he got whatever he was sold (not much has changed in the horse business). On the expedition, Scott had brought Lawrence ‘Titus’ Oates, an army captain who knew nothing about Arctic travel, but he was evidently a consummate horseman. He was unimpressed by the quality of the ponies that had been brought from Russia – thought they were pretty crap as far as horses went. Lousy conformation, badly behaved, unsound. They had quite a few difficulties with the ponies. Even good ponies would have failed to do much in Antarctica, but they didn’t even start out with that.
Cherry-Garrard has some pretty amazing ancedotes about ponies. Including one where they had gone on the barrier over solid ice, but then the ice started breaking up and the two ponies they’d brought on that little trip had to leap from one iceberg to another while orcas encircled the bergs, waiting for a pony to fall in. One of the ponies made it. The other became lunch for the resident orca pod.
I had a book that had a very short sidebar about this expedition. I distinctly remember it saying “The last pony, Socks, fell into a crevasse”
I always thought it was an odd detail to include.
Thanks for sharing! Those were very interesting. I’ve seen the Shackleton movie and read a few books on arctic and antarctic expeditions but I had never come across any of this.
