Vol. 15 No. 18 · 23 September 1993
page 25 | 2624 words
Diary
Wendy Doniger
Sadistic attacks on horses, often involving sexual mutilation, have been reported with alarming frequency in southern England since the mid-Eighties; several dozen mares, stallions and geldings have been savaged. Stallions have been slashed or castrated, and broom handles thrust inside mares. Special police action has been taken to counter this ‘horse-ripping’, as it is evocatively called, and horse-owners have formed vigilante Horse-watch movements. But since the perpetrators have not yet been identified, imagination runs amok: what sort of a person would want to do such a thing?
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Letters
Vol. 15 No. 21 · 4 November 1993
From Robert Ostermann
Wendy Doniger’s Diary (LRB, 23 September) argued her thesis most persuasively, but like so many other Eurocentric (forgive the odious but unavoidable term) perspectives, it translates poorly into the New World. The horse as a symbol of sex, politics and religion can be forced to fit the American West, past and present, only by the most ruthless procrustean surgery. In locations where the horse was neither a toy nor the plaything of mythologists but, instead, a guarantor of survival, anyone who sexually or otherwise mutilated a living horse could very easily find himself deballed or, at the least, strung up.
In Ms Doniger’s examples the American Indian is a deal more likely replacement for the horse, anyway on this side of the Mississippi River. And treated as more repellent by far than witches were those white men and women who succumbed to the sexual prowess (presumed) of Indians of either gender.
Robert Ostermann
Albuquerque, New Mexico
