ABSTRACT
The maintenance of horses in West Africa is in many areas made exceedingly difficult, and in some effectively impossible, by the problem of disease. In general, the state of health of horses in West Africa tends to deteriorate progressively as one moves southwards. Likewise, in the Mossi area horses used continuously for two or three months 'give up and die': Binger attributed their poor condition to lack of exercise, but it seems more reasonable to suppose that the local people made so little use of them precisely because of the delicacy of their health. Horses had been kept by the wealthy in the colony in some numbers, and evidently enjoyed good health, during the first half of the nineteenth century, but between 1856 and 1858 the horse population was virtually eliminated by an epidemic of a sickness christened 'loin disease' by contemporaries, which, was clearly trypanosomiasis. The training of horses in West Africa is normally undertaken by specialists.
