A_654 - There are many reasons for the use of horses and their near-total disappearance in favor of paved roads and automobiles. It's likely that cutting their tails to make violin bows and using nails in horseshoes made them unstable and less easily tamed. It's easy to imagine that, to be comfortable for horses, roads should be maintained so that they are free of rocks of any kind (because if a horse is galloping, a rock can be a major problem, and even if it were shod, it wouldn't be pleasant for it). Furthermore, shoeing horses is, in my opinion, a dangerous practice due to the use of nails, and it would be better to use another system to make "shoes" for horses, if one wanted to use them. Furthermore, it's likely that any waste scattered around should have been collected and used as fertilizer for vegetable gardens (as should be done with dog waste, which is sometimes abandoned), and that this profession too was perhaps mocked and denigrated. Regarding the docking of horses' tails, although we know there are no nerves in their tails, it's true that horses can feel their weight, and if they're cut, they'll clearly sense something's wrong, and consequently become antsy. A horse's tail serves both a useful aesthetic purpose during lovemaking and a tool for swatting flies near its rump (some fly bites can be very painful). As for hoof nails, it's easy to imagine that if the crack in the nail reaches the flesh due to impacts with the ground, the horse will feel pain, and that too can cause problems. As for the bows of musical instruments, instead of horsehair, you can probably use fishing lint—that should also work, as it's very strong—or even cotton threads or human hair.