Equicidal

The equicidal bull was finished in due course like his fellows, and at length but one remained, a brave, tough youngster that played the game vigorously, but yet without great malice, and to lamentably futile purpose.

This equicidal virus, which causes equine and human outbreaks, also has clinical characteristics which distinguish it from the sylvatic type.

In his enormously affecting play Equus, Peter Shaffer uses horses as a Christ symbol and the “sharp chains” in the horses’ mouths as a metaphor for Christ’s agonies. Much of the dramatic impact of the play is projected by Shaffer’s psychiatrist-protagonist who is tormented by the feeling that, by relieving the equicidal obsession of his seriously disturbed adolescent patient, he is destroying the boy’s deepest passions, his capacity “to worship,” as the psychiatrist puts it.

It’s just that extremely few trainers and riders will consider it anything less than equicidal.

Macbeth: I wish your horses swift and sure of foot, / And so do I commend you to their backs. / Farewell. (I think I’ll kill their horses, too.) /[…]I was not at all bothered by Macbeth’s interruption in the middle of his second speech, Banquo’s long comment on his short last speech, or the equicidal joke that concludes the scene.

You could point at the high incidence of Renaissance paintings, plaster saints, zucchini, frescoes, nuns, tricolor pasta, Day-Glo cyclists, olive trees, leaning towers, old women, equicidal horse races, two-lane motorways, bridges, dogs, geranium mini-gardens, Madonnas and Davids, baptisteries, and tiramisu ice cream—and much of this would be true.

Throughout the first part of the fourteenth century there are examples of actions against blacksmiths for killing horses vi et armis and contra pacem but it seems more likely these are actions for carelessness in shoeing the horse rather than that they indicate a group of equicidal tradesmen.

Worse still, mares tend to be testy and capricious even (or, indeed, sometimes especially) when in heat, and their unfortunate tendency to kick the stallions who try to mount them often inflicts permanent damage or impotence. The equicidal tendency of such mares would dampen the enthusiasm of the most passionate stud, making such an unfortunate stallion what breeders call a “dud stud.”