The Horse Memorial stands near St George's Park — a bronze horse, head lowered to a water trough, erected in 1905 in memory of the horses that died in the Anglo-Boer War. It is one of only a handful of monuments in the world built specifically to honour animals killed in war, and it is unexpectedly moving: a small, quiet statue in a shady corner of the city that carries a lot of weight.
Port Elizabeth was the primary landing point for military horses brought to South Africa during the war, and the city saw many of them — exhausted, underfed, worked to death on the veldt — pass through. The memorial was funded by public subscription from PE's citizens and designed by the sculptor Joseph Whitehead. It attracts little attention today from passing traffic, but it repays a few minutes of quiet attention. The inscription on the plinth is one of the better things written about the relationship between humans and the animals they conscript into their wars.