Date: Tue, 16 Jul 1996 16:59:13 -0400

From: Ron Butters RonButters[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]AOL.COM

Subject: Re: Tail above the dashboard



This is just a guess, but it seems to me that if the horse's tail was above

the dashboard it would keep from getting muddy, but it would also give the

driver a very disadvantgeous part of the horse to look at. So MAYBE this

means, "Don't worry about others--take care of your own tail"!



I remember my grandfather (born about 1880) singing a little song, "Horsey,

keep your tail up, keep the sun out of my eyes." He explained this to me as a

joke--nobody in his right mind, he said, would want the horse to keep its

tail up, even to keep the sun out of his eyes, since that would mean that the

horse's anus was directly at face level. Apparently, the dangers of

flatulence among hitched-up horses was a topic much joked about in the days

of horse'n'buggy and horse-drawn ploughs. People did not smoke while

ploughing, he said, for fear of explosion. But here he may have been pulling

my little-boy leg?