IOW mutilating animals for man’s convenience.
Trimming tails is mutilation? What do you call it when you get your kids hair cut?
FFS.
Yes and it is a good idea.
To make things better for the benefit of man.
Not necessarily... if you lose control of a harnessed horse while maneuvering a heavy wagon with 7 other horses hitched to it (which can happen if there is an equipment failure or something that causes a horse to react or stumble), the resulting injuries when the horses collide and become entangled could result in having to put down some of the animals. Not to mention losing control of an 8 horse hitch when grounds are packed in the same area... would be as bad as driving an SUV into the crowd.
So, it is a small sacrifice to prevent potentially fatal injuries.
You can see a couple Clydesdale wrecks on YouTube. ...and that occurred in an arena setting that the horses were accustomed to, with very experienced crew, and it wasn’t a result of something frightening causing a horse to try to bolt, like throwing fireworks, a crazy flying a drone at them, or a siren going off. The Clydesdales remained really calm in the pileup, but that may be because the handlers never lost control of the reins and remained calm too.
But mainly, it was a solution to protect draft horses from the hazards of their daily work. It isn’t for human convenience, if anything it is inconvenient. Now, the work is for human convenience. But without it there would never have been such a thing as a draft horse in the first place and none would ever have been born.
As for tail, it is minor compared to the kicking and biting stallions do when fighting naturally in the wild. Old stallions get pretty scarred up in these fights. The tail’s purpose is to swat flies away, but modern draft horses are treated for flies...you don’t see horseflies trailing that beer wagon.
Docking sheep tails is another case done not for human convenience but to protect sheep from pests that could do serious damage to their rears. Breeding sheep for wool was for human convenience, but docking tails was not... it is just a consequence of the sheep no longer being short haired, and being unable to shed.
Once can say tradition is bad, but the only reason draft horse breeds haven’t been allowed to go extinct is because the tradition still stands and Clydesdales in particular are still good advertising. The reason domestic sheep are still around is because they are useful and can be cared for.