WEST GERMANY: Not Fit for Horses

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Invariably the silence of the early spring morning is broken by the clonking and clanking of horses' hooves on the granite pavement, interspersed with the tinkling of metal and the thumping of wood: the fancy beer wagons on their daily route. This is a sound which Müncheners have been accustomed to for as long as they can remember. To them it represents an indigenous symbol of permanence.

So wrote Novelist Thomas Mann in a letter to his brother nearly 60 years ago. Now that symbol of permanence is gone. For 300 years, Munich's storied brewery horses made daily deliveries of Löwenbräu beer to inns in the old part of the city. Pulling up to 50 huge wooden kegs behind them, they managed to slow traffic through Munich's narrow streets to a clippety-clop, but the townsfolk rarely seemed to mind. Encountering a horse-drawn beer wagon had become a good-luck omen, on a par with seeing a chimney sweep. The chesty Belgian-Rhenish geldings, however, have fallen victim to the city's foul air—which a Ludwig Maximilian University study in Munich ranks second only to Tokyo's in pollutants. For their own sake, all 16 of the current crew have been banished to the piney slopes of lower Bavaria to haul timber.

In the past, about the worst the horses were known to suffer was poor teeth —too many sugar cubes from admiring children—and most reached the age of 20 before going to the slaughterhouse. But of late, said Löwenbräu's Heinz Moelter, "their fur lost its gloss, their eyes their shine, and their pulling power declined." Recently, Munich's local Animal Protection Society confirmed what the brewery had suspected. "They informed us that permitting the animals to continue working in Munich's poisonous atmosphere amounted to sheer cruelty," said Moelter. "Significantly, they didn't mention what the air did to human beings."

The horses will return once a year for Munich's 16-day autumnal beer bust, the Oktoberfest. Then, geared in blue velvet and leather harnesses, they will take up their old station in the Gabelsbergerstrasse and trot out daily to the festival grounds with wagons bearing garlanded but empty wooden kegs. At the same time, fume-belching trucks will deliver the real stuff in aluminum barrels.