Horses With A Taste For Flesh: A Forgotten History
The uncomfortably weird facts of equine carnivory.
This internet-rabbit-hole began when I saw that photoshop of a horse with exaggerated canine teeth. Its a pretty common image, you’ve probably seen it.
It’s a silly picture, though it played on some primal feelings. I felt a brief flash of fear, before laughing to myself. I felt pretty foolish. It’s just a meme, bro.
But it did get me thinking, and reading.
My wife was a self-described horse girl in her youth, though at the time she lived in suburban New Hampshire, and her horsecepades were mostly restricted to Pony Island.
When she finally met a horse face-to-snout, she recognized it as the towering feral beast of knitted muscle and sharp hoof that it is, and was thereafter appropriately terrified. I think she even stopped playing Pony Island, though I’d have to check the browser history.
She told me about a video she saw of a horse sucking up a baby chick like it was popcorn chicken. Poor little peep.
But that’s life. These things happen after all, though its uncomfortable to watch. But how often does it happen, and why? Should we worry?
Are horses capable of being vicious, murderous killers that devour their victims? And if so, how frequently?
Any serious move toward the answers to these questions will present you with this book by Irish demigod and equine expert CuChullaine O’Reilly:
The author is a founding member of The Long Rider’s Guild, the world’s first International Association of Equestrian Explorers. Taking a look at the roster, it seems a veritable League of Extraordinary Gentlemen of equestrians, male and female alike. Many living legends of the equestrian and travel-adventure worlds, with hundreds of years of experience living and traveling in remote locations, working in harmony with their trusty steeds.
With members in 43 countries, their connections were vital to O’Reilly’s research.
According to the guild’s site, O’Reilly himself has spent over 30 years perfecting the techniques of equestrian travel on every continent on Earth. He lead a historic expedition on horseback through Pakistan, and was made a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society for his contributions.
What I’m getting at is this guy knows what he’s talking about. He has written other books about horses too, including a detailed journal of his travels. He’s now working to establish the world’s first equestrian archaeology programme; an Indiana Jones for the equestrian world. But he wanted people to know the uncomfortable truth that’s so rarely discussed.
Sometimes horses do kill, and eat flesh.
Aren’t they intelligent, powerful, majestic creatures that should be respected and admired? They’re gentle herbivores.
Absolutely. But that doesn’t mean they won’t kill an animal they view as a threat, or step outside the tidy bounds of herbivory.
No matter what they’re domesticated and bred to do, foremost, they’re wild animals. Horses are rugged survivors, adaptable masters of their environment. They’ll stamp out (and bite) any potential threats, reaping the best of whatever resources are available. Not much different from ourselves.
So what did Deadly Equines have to say about it?
In its analysis spanning four thousand years of equestrian knowledge, Deadly Equines describes many incidents of horse carnivory driven by starvation, and the influence of mankind.
During our exploration of desolate polar regions, horses would subsist off meat in the absence of any viable plant material.
Their digestive systems aren’t well-suited to the task of breaking down meat or bone, and a horse wouldn’t be able to survive longterm on a diet of only protein. Despite that, their ability to adapt to another food source made our exploration of the arctic possible.
O’Reilly’s illumination of meat-eating horses isn’t just from witness testimony of harsh and remote expeditions. His stories come from every continent, and feature horses devouring over two dozen types of protein, notably including human flesh.
The vividly illustrated accounts come from various corroborative sources, and paint a picture at odds with the multi-million dollar horse industry, the ones who elevate and sterilize the horse’s image to sell magazines and tack. The author writes:
“The average human being’s daily knowledge of equine nature has diminished to an alarming extent…It has been replaced by a Disney-esque version of events where there is no dark side to nature. This is particularly true in Anglophone countries, where the appearance of books and films now commonly depicts horses in romantic terms.”
O’Reilly first heard about horses eating meat in 1977. He’d read about historical Long Rider Sven Hedin’s encounter with meat-eating horses in Tibet in the late 1800s. Meat, blood, and offal were offered to the Tibetan horses for ceremonial reasons, and readily consumed. While film of this practice exists, the ritual itself mostly vanished by the 1970s.
CuChullaine, already at that time an avid horse enthusiast, could barely grasp the magnitude of what Sven Hedin described. It set his mind alight, and he continued researching the subject, finding hundreds of similar incidents throughout history.
Even today, Kazakh tribesmen claim to train meat-eating horses to cross the inhospitable Gobi Desert. Similar horses were employed by CIA spies on their way from China to Tibet.
What the stories don’t do is reveal them as monsters, instead showcasing their complexity, and a perhaps intentionally forgotten side to their history beside us. The author seems to take a rational, factual approach to these tales.
However, there is at least one horrifying account of a real monster horse.
O’Reilly cites the book The Private Life of an Eastern King, published in 1855 by journalist William Knighton, and its firsthand description of an incident in which King George IV presented the Maharaja of Oudh with a beautiful thoroughbred stallion. Knighton was a writer in service to the Maharaja at the time.
The horse was a specimen of royal pedigree, meant to honor the North Indian leader. An unknown trigger caused the massive stallion to go insane, snapping into a deadly rampage during which it killed and ate several bystanders.
It probably looked fabulous doing it, too.
The horse became a notorious killer known as “The Man-Eater of Lucknow” (Lucknow being the name of the state’s capital city where the blood was shed.) The journalist happened upon the aftermath of The Man-Eater’s slaughter, and fled with his companion, ironically, in a horse-drawn buggy.
Knighton’s own horse was almost unmanageable with fear, and the pair barely escaped to the other side of an iron gate as the murderous horse pursued them.
“Just as the fall of the bolt secured our safety, the man-eater dashed up. His head was covered with blood, his jaws steaming with recent slaughter, his cheeks horrid with coagulated guts that had most probably spurted from his victims.
There he stood, with cocked ears, distended nostrils and glaring eye-balls, looking savagely at us through the iron railings. My poor horse trembled as if shivering with cold at the sight of this ferocious-looking monster.”
It gets wilder from there.
After the wild stallion was finally subdued and caged, the Maharaja arranged for his prized tiger, Burrhea, to dispatch the horse in an appropriately entertaining and brutal manner.
The great cat was an easy opponent, its jaw shattering beneath the ensuing tumult of iron-shod hooves, crippling the animal before it fled, whimpering, tail between its legs.
The stallion won its life, though it was a cruel one after that. From then on The Man-Eater of Lucknow was gawked at behind iron bars on public display. If you got too close, he’d bare his teeth and kick the bars in caged fury.
O’Reilly continues to dig deeper into the history of this story, and sent one of the first copies of Deadly Equines to Queen Elizabeth, herself an avid horsewoman, in the hopes that she could shed additional light on these events that were precipitated with a gift from the royal crown.
The original name of the horse remains unknown.