Since then I have been trying to work out whether the various horses which figure in the various costume dramas we watch here - Sherlock Holmes, Poirot, Barchester Towers and their like - have been fitted with these things. The horses do seem to hold their heads up but they are never in the right position for long enough to check for a bearing rein. I suppose I am going to have to resort to the pause button - a zoom button being too much to hope for on our bottom of the range DVD player. Or do the various replay sites on the internet have such a thing?
The point being that this seems to be an excellent issue to stir up the costume drama world with. It may well be that the clerics of places such as Barchester did indeed insist on their horses being fitted with bearing reins but is it fit that in recreating such places for our evening edification, we should recreate this particular iniquity? It all all very well making actors smoke on the job (I observe in passing that a lot of Trollope's characters smoke a lot of cigars); they are consenting human beings. They can chose not to play the game. But this is certainly not the case for dumb animals.
Maybe I could interest the Badger Brigade in the issue? Give them something to bite on in the slack season before the cull gets under way again?
Maybe it would be worth campaigning to get the Board of Governors of the BBC to issue a code of conduct controlling the use of bearing reins in productions which they commission - an outright ban being perhaps a little millenarian at this time?
PS: with thanks to Mr. Google for the illustration. Does anyone know where it comes from?
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