Diary: Crazy about Horses
Wendy Doniger, 23 September 1993
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?