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Horse Maiming in the English
Countryside: Moral Panic, Human Deviance, and the Social
Construction of Victimhood
Roger Yates, Chris Powell
University of Wales-Bangor
Piers Beirne 1
University of Southern Maine
The societal reaction to a series of horse assaults in rural
Hampshire during the 1990s was a rare example of a moral panic
about crime and deviance in which animals other than humans
occupy, or seemed to occupy, the central role of victim. This
paper explores how the nature of the relationships between
humans and animals is revealed through authoritative utterances
about offenders and victims by the mass media, the police, and
the humans who felt they had a stake in the horses’ well-being.
Analysis of how and when victimhood is ascribed to animals helps
to uncover the invisible assaults routinely inflicted on them-in
the name of business or pleasure, for example-and against whose
human perpetrators the categories of criminalization are almost
never applied.
Of the diverse social practices investigated by criminologists
and sociologists of deviance, very few have attracted as much
attention in the last three decades as those designated by the
sociological concept of moral panic. Though why moral panics
arise when and as they do is unclear, it is nevertheless true
that every so often a society becomes engrossed in a process of
public frenzy directed to certain forms of crime and deviance.
Recent and well-documented examples of moral panics include
those associated with the McCarthyite communist scare of the
1950s, dope fiends in the 1960s, youth gangs and serial killers
in the 1980s, and child molesters and high-school murderers in
the 1990s (Cohen, 1972; Cohen & Young, 1973; Jenkins, 1998;
Best, 1999).
Though any given moral panic has its own dramatic
idiosyncrasies, each also shares certain sociological properties
with other such panics. Chief among these common properties are
(a) a point of inception at which, for whatever reason, certain
social practices or events are identified as a social problem in
need of amelioration; (b) the emergence of a vanguard of moral
entrepreneurs whose stated purpose is leadership in attacking
the problem; (c) the formulation of the vanguard’s message about
the seriousness of the problem and about attributions of
blameworthiness and of victimhood, which are most effectively
disseminated to a concerned social audience by the mass media;
and (d) a demand for the deployment of agents of social control
to identify and apprehend appropriate offenders - or "folk
devils", to use Stanley Cohen’s (1972) evocative term - and
thereby to reaffirm the moral values of the community.
This paper investigates certain aspects of the moral panic
associated with a series of horse assaults (“maimings”) that
occurred in England from the early 1990s onwards. For nearly a
decade, a number of horse assaults occurred in fields and
stables, mainly, though not exclusively, in southern England,
especially in the counties of Hampshire and Surrey. Though the
empirical focus of this paper is confined to the moral panic
that occurred in rural Hampshire from June 1991 to February 1993
(see Fig.1), horse assaults also were reported from 1993 to 1997
in Oxfordshire, Buckinghamshire, Cleveland, and Hull;2 Dorset;3
Greater Manchester;4 Swindon to North Yorkshire (“100 attacks in
12 months”), and Wiltshire.5 The assaults were extensively
reported in the national and local tabloid and broadsheet press.
One national tabloid, the Daily Mail, added a reward of £10,000
to the £8,000 already pledged by organizations such as the
International League for the Protection of Horses, Naturewatch
Trust, and the equestrian magazine Horse & Hound for information
leading to the conviction of those responsible.6 When a mare
named Mountbatten was found dead in her stable with cuts to her
genitals, a meeting of concerned citizens in the small village
of Four Marks in rural Hampshire set up the Horsewatch
organization in early February 1993; this organization was the
first of 85 such groups formed within 18 months.7 The police
then established the Mountbatten Operation, with twelve officers
attached to it. Some police officers were designated as Wildlife
Liaison Officers in police stations located in the relevant
areas.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
KEY
Alton:
1. May 4 1992. Pony mare assaulted in stable _ internal injuries
from blunt instrument.
2. Jun 22 1992. Thoroughbred cross gelding stabbed in a stable -
cuts to shoulder.
3. Jun 31 1992. Hack gelding cut on the shoulder while standing
in a field.
4. Jul 16 1992. Hack gelding cut with sharp instrument.
5. Jan 7 1993. Pony mare found bleeding from the rear.
6. Jan 7 1993. Gelding taken from stable and ‘covered in mud’.
7. Jan 22 1993. Mountbatten found dead.
Andover:
8. Jul 16 1992. New Forest mare - internal bruising and lashed
with barbed wire.
Between Winchester and Southampton:
Chilworth:
9. Aug 4 1991. Palamino pony assaulted.
10. Aug 28 1991. Welsh cob mare cut on legs and flanks.
Romsey:
11. Mar 17 1992. Arab gelding cut on head.
12. Mar 19 1992. Internal cuts to pony in field.
Southampton:
13. Oct 15 1992. Four horses attacked - slashed with sharp
instrument - one had spike stuck in chest.
Winchester:
14. Jun 13 1991. Pony mare burnt with rope.
15. Aug 13 1992. Hack gelding attacked - rope burns on legs.
Between Southampton and Petersfield:
Botley:
16. Jul 13 1992. Shetland gelding slashed.
Bursledon:
17. Feb 28 1991. Pony attacked in field - internal bruising and
swelling, external cuts.
Droxford:
18. Jul 13 1992. Mare attacked in a field - internal bruising.
Durley:
19. Sep 2 1991. Palamino mare attacked - beaten with a blunt
instrument.
Kilmeston:
20. Jan 6 1993. Mare attacked.
Havant and Portsmouth area:
Havant:
21. Jul 26 1992. Riding pony mare slashed four times under the
tail.
Meon:
22. Jun 13 1992. Shetland pony mare assaulted - lacerations
internally and externally.
Portsmouth:
23. Jun 14 1992. Welsh cob mare - wounds to hind legs and
internal bruising.
Upham:
24. Feb 3 1993. Pregnant mare assaulted.
The New Forest area:
Fordingbridge:
25. Nov 23 1992. Pregnant brood mare assaulted internally - lost
her foal.
New Forest:
26. Sep 14 1992. Mare burnt with caustic substance.
27. Sep 17 1992. Gelding cut deeply on the nose.
Source: adapted from The Times, 2.6.1993
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In this paper, we are far less concerned with answering the
question, “Who dunnit?” than we are with uncovering the
processes of how various individuals, ad hoc groups, and social
organizations in Hampshire tried to make sense of events that
seemed deviant, irrational, and/or criminal to an outraged
citizenry. In particular, we wish to explore how the nature of
the relationships between humans and animals other than humans
(hereafter, animals) is revealed through authoritative
utterances by the media, the police, and the humans who felt
they had a stake in the horses’ well being.
Two preliminary points must be made about the Hampshire horse
assaults and the attendant moral panic. First, horses and many
other animals have been assaulted in England for centuries,
sometimes systematically and routinely so. A large number of
related maimings of cattle and horses occurred 150 years ago in
Norfolk, Suffolk, and parts of Cambridgeshire (Archer, 1985).
However, the social situation and significance of these
mid-nineteenth-century maimings differed profoundly from the
ones we address here. Information about the former maimings does
not seem to have been widely circulated, while the horse
assaults of the 1990s were extensively publicized. Moreover,
whereas the earlier animal maimings led to several convictions,
no one was ever prosecuted and convicted for the assaults
discussed here. The discourse of the 1990s moral panic thus was
highly speculative about such key questions as the possible
identity and characteristics of the offender(s).8
Second, the moral panic about horse assaults in 1990s rural
England differed from nearly all other moral panics in that many
of its central characters were animals. This is not to say that
animals have never been visible in other moral panics. Rather,
if animals are present in moral panics, then their roles tend to
be passive and their voices peripheral to the main script. This
typically secondary and socially unproblematic role of animals
is evident in the diverse panics associated with bestiality (or
sexual assault of animals) in seventeenth-century Puritan New
England and elsewhere (Beirne, 1997), rabies among uncontrolled
dogs in late Victorian urban England (Walton, 1979), and variant
Creutzfeldt-Jakob (Mad-Cow) disease among cattle in Britain in
the 1990s (Kitzinger and Reilly, 1997; Tester, 1997).
However, within the framework of the moral panic addressed here,
certain horses and their plight occupied, or seemed to occupy,
the central role of victim. An analysis of the circumstances in
which victimhood was, or might be, ascribed to horses is the
focus of what follows.
Horse-Maiming Matters
It is impossible to speculate with any degree of confidence
about whether, before the emergence of the moral panic that
brought them widespread attention in the early 1990s, horse
assaults in Hampshire were very rare phenomena or, instead,
quite commonplace. Indeed, because an isolated incident can be
easily denied or declared relatively unimportant, the primary
definers in this moral panic were consistently at pains to claim
that the horse assaults were not isolated incidents but a
sequence of events with an observable pattern. One therefore
cannot identify the precise conjuncture of time, place, and
assault in Hampshire such that it can in retrospect be
identified as the first case in a series of horse assaults that
occurred there during the 1990s.
According to one account, the series of horse assaults in
question started in Hampshire at some time before 1983,9
although a Horsewatch official claimed that horses had been
mutilated there as far back as 1966.10 Another claimed “the
‘horse rippers’ first came to public attention during the
Eighties, though attacks had occurred before that.”11 In 1993,
The Times identified 27 horse assaults in Hampshire. Basing its
figures on comments from a police spokesperson, The Times
referred to “scores of reports” that it had received about the
assaults.12 Significantly, for whatever reason, the Hampshire
horse assaults were portrayed as serious events. The notion of
seriousness and its differing degrees may of course be
understood in several ways, one of which is through
straightforward descriptions of the physical injuries sustained
by the horses.
Reports in The Times, for example, refer to the following cases:
a pregnant Welsh cob mare named Daphne who was attacked with a
Stanley knife strapped to a pole;13
a twenty-three-year-old mare named Chiltern Hills who had her
genitals mutilated;14
a thirty-one-year-old mare named Gay Minstrel who was slashed
across the quarters and had her genitals mutilated;15
an eleven-year-old thoroughbred named Kerry who was stabbed in
the genitals;16
a twenty-year-old mare cut into by a five-inch knife;17
a four-year-old 'working horse' stabbed in the shoulder;18
a mare named Chrissie had her genitals slashed and a fencepost
driven inside her;19
ponies burnt with caustic soda;20 and
an Irish hunter mare named Mountbatten found dead in her stable
with cuts to her genitals.21
Despite routine media dramatization and hyperbole, which are
hardly conducive to reliable estimates of incidence, some
unknown number of horses unquestionably experienced pain, sexual
assault, and?in one or two cases?death. Yet, not all such harms
inflicted on animals are taken seriously. Why did the Hampshire
assaults reported above matter? To whom? How should they be
understood?
An obvious feature of the societal reaction to the Hampshire
horse assaults is that they were universally regarded as
reprehensible. The public condemnation of the nameless and
faceless horse maimers was just as unequivocal as it was later
to be for the “Yorkshire Ripper,” Peter Sutcliffe, and for the
notorious murderers, Thomas Hamilton and Fred West (Collier,
1997; Cameron & Frazier, 1987, pp. 124-138). No one publicly
tried to justify the horse assaults. Was this simply because the
British are a nation of animal lovers? Clearly, the assaults
prompted a line of questioning meant to understand events that,
though known by all as abhorrent and aberrant, were chiefly seen
as senseless.
As ethnomethodologists and others have observed (Garfinkel,
1967, p. 42), those who initially regard an event as senseless,
are liable, if it concerns them enough, to spend a great deal of
time and energy trying to make sense of it. But we must ask
again: Why did anyone care about these assaults? The citizenry
was invited to care because the media described the assaults as
simultaneously both systematic and random: systematic because it
seemed that each of the horse assaults was one act in a series
of assaults, random because no one had any idea when or where
the perpetrator would strike next.
But why should the citizenry?and we?care about these horse
assaults? One reason for caring is that the media conveyed the
message that horse assaults are a serious matter. They are
serious because many people seem to think them serious.
Certainly, important sections of the local community in Four
Marks seemed to take them seriously. The local paper, The Alton
Herald, informed its readers that at the inaugural Horsewatch
meeting “hundreds of people crowded into Four Marks village
hall, whilst others were forced to stand outside straining to
hear through open windows.”22 Moreover, some residents started
to employ private security companies, while others blocked the
police switchboard in search of advice. The horse-keeping
community was understandably most anxious and insisted that the
police apprehend the culprit. Horse owners expressed their
feelings of loss and fear and repeatedly and resolutely stated
their unwillingness to suffer a similar experience again.
The police certainly took the horse assaults seriously, and they
established the “Mountbatten Operation.” Of course, regardless
of any given officer’s feelings for horses, these events
provided the police with a heaven-sent opportunity to be seen to
be responding to demands placed upon them by the national and
local press and by significant members of the local community.
Referring to the “overwhelming response” from the public, the
police spoke of a general need for the police and the public to
bond together. As Crime Prevention Officer Bill Slater told
horsekeepers, “the police are the professionals in detecting
crime, but you are our eyes and ears of the equestrian
community.”23 In response, the Horsewatch coordinator declared
“hopefully, by all of us being a bit more vigilant, we can start
to make a hole in the crime rates of Hampshire.”24
The respective interests and concerns of each of the main
protagonists in this drama coalesced around the numerous sound
bytes and column inches devoted to one key question: What sort
of person could assault horses? As Fiona Broderick, daughter of
Mountbatten’s owner, Robert Broderick, asked, what “drives
people to do this to an animal?”25 This is a valid and
meaningful question. It remains so. Yet, no one was ever
convicted of these horse assaults or even prosecuted for them.
Public discourse about such key questions as the assailants’
identity, characteristics, and motives therefore tended to be
highly speculative, its protagonists almost off-guard when
giving voice to their opinions or vent to their prejudices.
As will soon become clear, behind this sometimes-frenzied
rhetoric lie hidden strongly held beliefs about the nature of
criminality and of how and under what circumstances victimhood
may be ascribed to animals. In the specific cultural context of
animals and racialization, for example, Elder, Wolch, and Emel
(1998)have argued that “animals and their bodies appear to be
one site of struggle over the protection of national identity
and the production of cultural difference” (p.184). Indeed, the
whys, hows, and whens of the process of victimhood construction
occupy an often hotly contested cultural landscape at the nexus
of struggles that may involve kaleidoscopic issues of class,
gender, race, and age.
Offenders
As soon as the horse assaults were constituted as a series of
serious deviant events, questions inevitably were raised about
the identity and motivation of the offender(s). The horse owners
(henceforth often self-identified victims who we term
“owner-victims”),26 the police, and various experts attached to
the investigation or consulted by the media were the key voices
speculating on these questions in public and in the media.
The majority of the authoritative definers of knowledge of the
horse assaults immediately assumed, albeit with varying degrees
of sophistication, that the offender had a pathological
character. This assumption, when voiced from the dominant
perspective of owner-victims, tended to be articulated in
statements such as, “It would have taken two strong men, one to
hold Daphne, the other to cut the terrified horse. What kind of
person would do that?...Sick. They are sick.”27
Perhaps this pathological male?all seemed to have assumed the
horse assailant was male?came from that pathological world
beyond the normal and pleasant world of village halls and
country f?tes? The police warned the public to be on the
look-out for “shady-looking characters” and they were reportedly
seeking information on “unfamiliar cars” parked in the “wrong
place”28 As owner-victim Anna Sheldon’s mother commented, “it is
a sick society we live in today,” from whose ailments,29
presumably, even Four Marks?the small Hampshire village in which
the ten-year-old Irish mare Mountbatten was killed?and similar
places were not immune.
One interpretation of these events is that they were a
metaphor?the evil world of shady characters was insinuating
itself into the hitherto solid and respectable world of Middle
England. There was a fear of the enemy without, the “New Age
Travellers”, “Hunt Saboteurs”, “Eco-Warriors”, “Refugees” and
“Asylum Seekers”. However, alongside this fear was something
even more worrisome?might the enemy not be within? One
frightened resident of Four Marks speculated that perhaps
“somebody could be living next door to this person or just down
the road from them.”30 Moreover, a speaker at Four Marks’
village hall put it in classic Agatha Christie vein: “The person
carrying out these attacks could be anyone. They could even be
in this room tonight.”31
The openly stated consensus view about the offender’s (or
offenders’) identity, though, was clearly the pathological one.
The designation of offenders as pathological precluded further
consideration as to the conceivable rationality of their
actions. Certainly, it is simple for those neither
professionally nor personally involved in any specific case to
dismiss some acts as purely pathological, especially when their
perpetrators remain at large and unknown. Moreover, a
descriptive term that was often attached to the as-yet-unknown
assailants?“horse rippers”32 -invoked not only the dubious
skills of an amateur, if wayward, surgeon (a medical student,
perhaps, or a crazed aristocrat?) but also a bygone era in
London’s East End when another Ripper reigned with similarly
unpredictable psychological terror. Thus, in the course of a
conversation that could flow smoothly into a discussion of the
state of world soccer or the latest Hollywood blockbuster, the
horse assaults could easily be dismissed as the work of a
“maniac,”33 a “psychopath,”34 “lunatic,”35 a “pervert,”36 or a
“disturbed,”37 or “sick”38 person who “needs help.”39 We raise
our eyebrows in horror and express our contempt for those whom
the Sunday Times termed “a madman or madmen...the most hated men
in Britain.”40 But having done so, we soon pass on to other
matters.
The closer a given person was to the horse assaults, the greater
was the need to reflect on the meaning of it all. At the very
least, people wanted some sort of understanding about the
precise nature of the pathology. Such reflection tends to evince
a simple polar dichotomy of sane/insane. But this polarity is
clearly only a starting point. Thus, one horse owner spoke of
the perpetrator as “dreadfully sick mentally.”41 A Royal Society
for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals spokesperson reflected
that “whoever is doing this must have a sick, disturbed mind.”42
Obviously, the sane/insane dichotomy is altogether too neat in
the sense that, in practice, people offer viewpoints that allude
to their awareness of the kernels of rationality that might lie
within the pathology. Given an individual’s “crazed
assumptions,” a sort of reason might well be exercised in order
to guide crazed actions. If one insanely believes X, then the
flow of thought, which leads to insane action Y, might
internally be quite rational. Moreover, personally motivated and
professional investigators of truth, when confronted by an
insane act, may pursue the insane beliefs that are held to
explain that act. Thus, with regard to the horse maiming cases,
Tony Black, a retired chief psychologist at Broadmoor Hospital,
speculated that the offender was a person who suffered from
“bizarre mental delusions” and who, furthermore, “saw horses as
devil-carriers.”43 In other words, the delusional belief that
horses were devil-carriers led to a somewhat rational wish to
destroy them. From the offender’s perspective, Black seemed to
imply, it was not really the horses who were victimized but the
Devil!
There was an alternative and contradictory version of this sort
of symbolic hypothesization. One Horsewatch official noted that
many local residents believed the attacks might be the work of
Satan-like cults intent on sacrificing innocent horse victims to
the Devil.44 Such sacrifices might make sense to believers in
Satan. A police officer suggested that perhaps the perpetrator
was a Hunt Saboteur (presumably, for anti-hunting fanatics it
would be rational to leave a series of animals dead and maimed
around the countryside of southern England!).45
This brings us to rather less publicly voiced suspicions held by
some owner-victims as to the meaning of these crimes. This was
the notion that they, rather than the horses, were the real
targets. An interview conducted by one of the authors with a
Horsewatch representative indicated that, while uniformly
rejecting any idea that they had done anything which might
somehow justify revenge attacks, several people were worried
that the perpetrator’s real target was their way of life. Such
anxieties are a manifestation of the “respectable fears” that
are an endemic feature of middle and upper-middle class life in
contemporary rural England (Pearson, 1983).
Commonsense theory on deviance takes an act and then pursues
assumptions about the actor’s characteristics. The ideological
function of the process is to render highly suspicious those
sections of the population that seem to have those
characteristics. In the case at hand, this may have negative
implications not only for Satanists but also, perhaps more
seriously, for those opposed to the norms, values, and practices
of rural England’s upper-middle class.
Victims
The problem of the victims’ identity and status is one issue
arising from these cases. Victim identification should never be
assumed. A victim must be successfully constituted as such.
Victimhood, therefore, is not an objective juridic or
sociological condition. It is an ascribed social status. Because
effective claims-making can instigate victimhood by some
sections of society have acquired the ability to establish that
their suffering is unnecessary, serious, and caused by dangerous
criminals. This process of victimhood-in-the-making is both
quickened and intensified if the innocence of the would-be
victims can be dramatically contrasted with the malevolence of
their assailants. Put bluntly, some victims are worthy, others
are not. Moreover, the worthier the victim, the more
reprehensible the offender.
With regard to humans, modern law assumes a principle of
individual worth and rights, even if political and sociological
factors routinely amplify the worthiness of some claims and
render invisible that of others. However, if as a matter of
principle and legal parchment all humans have legal rights, what
of animals in general and of horses in particular? Can a horse
be a victim? Why should we care about a horse’s suffering?
Certainly, in the sense of animal welfare legislation, it is
illegal to cause horses unnecessary suffering. However, the
master status of horses is that of humans’ property (Francione,
1995; Wise, 2000). In practice, the police interpreted the horse
assaults as constituting acts of “criminal damage”46 (i.e.
property offenses), and victimhood was legally ascribed to the
property owners.47 It is very likely that the horse owners in
question tended to be situated in the higher, if not the
highest, echelons of their communities and that they had a very
comfortable amount of income, status and social influence. They
were well situated in terms of the local hierarchy of
credibility. It is their victimhood that, in one sense, enables
the horse assaults to be treated seriously. This is logical.
After all, the humans, not the horses, can and do complain. Yet,
on whose behalf do humans complain?
Clearly, malicious injury to a horse is usually not regarded as
equivalent to the intentional infliction of damage to other
forms of fast transport such as cars and motorcycles. Yet, why
not? Car and motorcycle owners invest much time and money in
their machines and arguably obtain emotional satisfaction from
them. Indeed, their respective owners might use some very
similar and easily transferable phrases to describe the purely
instrumental qualities of horses and cars. Some statements by
horse owners included the following: “Last season, he did well
in dressage. Obviously, this is going to slow things down a
bit,”48 “He was a very expensive show jumper,”49 “a well-bred
potential superstar”;50 and “wonderful to ride.”51 However,
often combined with such transferable observations by horse
owners are utterances that, if used by car owners to refer to
their cars, would sound absurd. Would people comment tearfully
about a damaged or wrecked car that “Her death left a great gap
in my life” or “I’d owned her since she was a yearling” or “She
was almost a member of the family”? Even if such comments might
conceivably be made about cars, they surely would involve
additional claims-making on the behalf of owner-victims. On the
surface at least, they also create doubt about whether the horse
assaults were only about property. To understand the importance
of this ambiguity, we must return to the meaning of English
animal welfare legislation, which contains an explicit
acknowledgment of animal sentiency (Radford, 1999).52 As noted,
this legislation is based on the concept of “unnecessary
suffering” (and before that on the notion that animals could not
be “cruelly” treated). English law seemsto recognize, therefore,
that animals can be victims or, at least, the suffering
recipients of cruelty. It may posit that animals are sentient
beings; yet, harming an animal puts one at no greater legal risk
than being charged with minor property damage. With regard to
assaults on animals, it is possible, in law, to violate the
property rights of persons53 whether or not unnecessary
suffering is caused to the property in question. In this sense,
any suffering caused to the animal becomes a matter separate
from the original property offense and secondary to it. Animals,
like human slaves before them, are afforded, in law, the strange
status of sentient property.
How far does this status help us to explain police officers who
stress the property nature of the offenses and owners who
emphasize the non-instrumental qualities or characteristics of
their horses?
Why else does Mountbatten’s owner bother to tell reporters: “I
hate the thought that a helpless animal, who has grown to trust
and love in their own little way, could suffer at the hands of a
human like this?”54 Why does another owner-victim tell
journalists: “He was a nice horse”?55
Perhaps, after all, the horse is the victim? Certainly, the
Detective Superintendent investigating the assaults implied this
by his observation that “the victims can't talk to you.”56 Nor
can human murder victims talk. Their victimhood is socially
recognized and usually extended and transported beyond
themselves. Their family and friends suffer, so too might their
“community,” and, on occasions, we are told that “the nation
grieves”.
It also has been argued that the whole world (at least the
decent bit of it) shares the pain of the Kosovo dead. In theory,
we recognize the right of people to draw attention to others’
victimhood; in practice, we usually depend on their doing so.
With regard to the Hampshire horse assaults, there was
considerable ambiguity about the victim’s identity. This
ambiguity, in practical terms, is partially smoothed over by
consensus that something very wrong had occurred, but it also
indicates the unsettled nature of the relationship between
horses and humans and between the humans and all other animals.
As Thomas puts it: “If we look below the surface we shall find
many traces of guilt, unease and defensiveness about the
treatment of animals” (1983, p. 50).
There is yet another way in which we are invited to take the
horse assaults seriously. This resided in the popular belief
that an assault on a horse might be a precursor to an assault on
a human. Thus, just after a local girl had been stabbed, one
media commentator mused, “it was only a matter of time before
these attacks turned from horses on to people.”57 Another noted
that the attacks against the horses were, in themselves,
sinister enough; but from the beginning, police were predicting
that horse rippers also might turn on children. Could that now
have happened?58 This view might be credible, regardless of
whether the perpetrator is perceived as “purely pathological” or
as “pathologically rational.” A psychopath sufficiently deranged
as to assault horses may well be inclined to turn his attention
to humans. Or perhaps (s)he had already assaulted humans before
turning to animals. Alternatively, a resentment of privileged
people might mean that the “real” victims would likely be
targeted next time around, not just their horses as property or
indeed their proxy. This sort of ad-hoc theorizing implies that
the meaning of the horse assaults needed to be taken even more
seriously than the assaults themselves.
Because a killer is a killer is a killer?so goes the
logic?vulnerable young, especially female, owners received
strident warnings not to take risks by watching over their
horses and ponies during the night.59 If seriousness cannot be
accorded on a principled basis, perhaps it can on pragmatic
self-interest.
Clearly, this sort of projection functions to sharpen broader
perceptions and intensify the magnitude of the sense of threat
and anxiety. At the same time, it dulls our ability to see
assaults on horses as serious in their own right. From a
speciesist perspective, “it’s all about us”.
Discussion
For all the confusion that surrounds them, both the horse
assaults and the moral panic described above attest to the fact
that humans sometimes are allowed to assault, injure and kill
horses. Not only this, but sometimes they are even rewarded for
doing so. The assaults within the moral panic described above,
however, go beyond such lawful or socially acceptable
situations.
Assaults where crime/deviance categories are invoked usually
involve claims about the wrong person, the wrong place, the
wrong reasons/intentions, the wrong methods, the wrong time and
the wrong targets. The hand wringing that accompanies popular
explanations of such deviance might lead to broader inquiry into
the ways in which humans use animals, though in practice it
tends to distract us from further exploration. It must be
stressed, however, that a variety of institutionalized social
practices in which horses are routinely and systematically
assaulted generally are not characterized as unlawful and
socially unacceptable behavior. Moreover, in these other
locations of horse assaults?such as laboratories, farms,
racetracks and abattoirs?it somehow seems much harder and much
less appropriate to pathologize the perpetrators of the harms
committed there. As such, it appears ethically and ontologically
incorrect to ask about these social practices, “what drives the
humans involved to do what they do?” or “who could do such an
awful thing?” It even seems to cast a shadow on the putative
logic within the claim that a killer is a killer is a killer.
Why is the harmful nature of some horse assaults condemned while
that of others is condoned? This thorny question has no simple
answer, though during the Hampshire moral panic about horse
assaults, members of the public, the police, criminal
psychologists, and animal welfare officials admitted only
particular sorts of abused horses into their circle of concern.
The focus of their analyses and utterances was not horse
assaults in general but individual animals, individual acts of
animal abuse, and individual perpetrators of harm. Indeed,
precisely the same sort of methodological individualism has
tended to dominate recent social scientific thought about the
relationships between society and animal abuse.
This discourse has conceived of “society” as an amalgam of
atomized individuals apart from questions of race, gender, and
social class. So, too, the animals admitted to the acceptable
circle of concern tend only to be those considered as
individuals with, as Cazaux (1999) rightly points out, “a
visible and acknowledged personality and biography” (p. 121). In
contrast, she argues, millions of other animals are exploited in
large-scale commercial processes in which the individual is lost
in production quotas and mortality rates. Without being
identified as individuals, millions of animals are rendered
invisible. Cazaux is among a growing number of scholars and
activists who adopt a non-speciesist approach in which the types
of assaults we have detailed here are placed in a wider context
that explores the myriad of human-animal relationships.60
In the case of horses, such a view would identify the extensive
commercial exploitation of animals and the myriad ways in which
their natural and social worlds are thereby routinely harmed and
devalued (Lawrence, 1984; Elder, Wolch and Emel, 1998, pp.
188-189).61 With this wider perspective in mind, let us briefly
describe how, in the name of business or pleasure, horses (known
as “racehorses”) used in the large British racing industry, are
routinely assaulted.
Annually, more than 200 horses die on racetracks in Britain
(Gold, 1995, p. 115). Flat racing depends on the use of young
(two-year-old) horses, on whose developing limbs great pressure
is placed. The racing of horses at a young age results in a high
burn-out rate and “near epidemics of tendon and ligament damage”
(ibid.). In steeple-chases (racing over fences), the chance of
injury is heightened because the horses run longer races and can
suffer many falls. It is rare even for showpiece events such as
Liverpool’s annual Grand National?where standards are closely
monitored and enforced due to the attention of the media and the
animal protection movement?to pass without fatalities. At the
prestigious Cheltenham race meeting, as many as 10 horse deaths
have occurred in one week (Saunders, 1996, p. 8).
The practice of firing horses’ tendons still is commonplace in
the racing industry (Davies, 1998, p. 9). Davies explains that
the aim of the practice, which involves placing red-hot irons
around areas of tendon damage, is to strengthen and support a
horse’s leg with the formation of scar tissue near the weakened
areas. She notes that, like all athletes, a tendon-damaged horse
requires rest. However, resting a racehorse may be costly;
therefore, tendon firing is sometimes regarded as an
alternative. Thoroughbred racehorses are often treated like
machines: “they have a job to do” (Davies). Sometimes the scar
tissue holds up and allows a horse to run. However, sometimes
firing may be done in order to get a horse looking fit enough to
be entered in a race; then. if she “breaks down” and is
“destroyed” on the track, insurance payments may be claimed.
Because racehorses are valuable financial assets, the industry
invests up to £1 million annually through the Racehorse Betting
Levy Board to protect them. This expenditure includes a large
sum for the commissioning of vivisection experiments on
lesser-valued horses. For example, at the Animal Health Trust in
Newmarket (the site of a famous English race course) in 1993,
twelve pregnant Welsh mountain ponies were injected with equine
herpes, a practice that resulted in aborted pregnancies and
paralysis. Following the experiments, the ponies were killed so
that post mortem examinations could be performed on them. The
researcher who performed these experiments?who was not
constructed as insane or perverse or at risk of committing other
violent or harmful actions?explained that they were conducted
for economic reasons, namely, because “equine herpes is an
important source of loss to the horse industry” (Gold, 1993, p.
2). “Loss” here, of course, refers to horseowners’ financial
losses?no less, no more. Further experiments are carried out on
horses to study their reproduction process and to investigate
the treatment of racing-induced injuries (Gold, 1996).
The plight of ex-racing horses, moreover, may be “a debilitating
downward spiral of sale, resale and neglect" (Gold, 1995, p.
115), including being sent to one of the three British abattoirs
licensed to slaughter horses or being sold to overseas
slaughterhouses. Annually, 25,000 horses are killed for meat in
Britain, and 3,000 are withdrawn by their owners from British
racing (Davies, 1998, p. 9), their value quickly plummeting.
Though legislation stipulates that horses worth less than £175
cannot be exported, horsemeat dealers avoid this restriction by
claiming that horses are being sent overseas to race. Once
abroad, they are diverted to abattoirs (Wood, 1995).
Conclusion
This paper has identified some of the key themes of the moral
panic associated with a series of horse assaults in rural
Hampshire during the early 1990s. These events are a rare
example of a moral panic about crime and deviance in which
animals occupy, or seemed to occupy, the central role of victim.
In particular, we have tried to uncover how the nature of the
relationships between humans and other animals is revealed
through authoritative utterances about offenders and victims by
the mass media, the police, and the humans who felt they had a
stake in the horses’ well being. We suggest that understanding
how and when victimhood is ascribed to animals helps uncover the
invisible assaults that are routinely inflicted on animals and
against whose perpetrators the categories of criminalization are
almost n
Notes
1 Correspondence should be sent to Piers Bierne, Department of
Criminology, University of Southern Maine, 96 Falmouth Street,
Portland, ME 04104-9300. The authors are grateful to Ken Shapiro
and to two anonymous reviewers of this journal for their
encouragement and helpful comments.
3 See The Times, 2.6.1993.
3 The Times, 6.23.1997.
4 Daily Telegraph, 9.19.1997.
5 The Observer, 10.12.1997.
6 Alton Herald, 1.29.1993; The Times, 2.6.1993.
7 Alton Herald, 2.4.1993; and see The Times, 4.9.1993
8 Contrary to the traditional view that animal maiming was
simply a vicious form of rebellion by rural laborers against the
landed gentry, Archer shows how in practice it was a peculiar,
complex, and quite varied activity. Animal maiming was sometimes
undoubtedly a form of social rebellion, as in the maiming of
their masters’ horses by horsekeepers. Typically, however, it
was a form of psychological terror, of symbolic murder, that
resulted from personal feuds between members of the same social
class. Thus, the maiming of donkeys and asses tended to indicate
a dispute between one craftsperson and another - such as
blacksmiths, cordwainers, butchers and laborers - since they
were the chief owners of such animals. But the poisoning of cats
and dogs, for example, suggests a conflict between farmers and
gamekeepers over the rearing of game birds (Archer, 1985,
pp.152-153).
9 The Times, 1.5.1993. The Times, 1.5.1993.
10 Sunday Times, 10.31.1993.
11 The Observer, 10.12.1997.
12 The Times, 2.6.1993.
13 The Sunday Times, 11.31.1993.
14 The Times, 1.5.1993.
15 The Times, 5.23.1997.
16 ibid.
17 ibid.
18 Alton Herald, 7.10.1992.
19 The Observer, 11.12.1997.
20 Borden Times & Mail, 2.2.1993.
21 The Times, 1.25.1993; Alton Herald, 1.29.1993.
22 Alton Herald, 2.4.1993.
23 ibid.
24 ibid.
25 Daily Telegraph, 3.6.1996.
26 See further n.48, infra.
27 Angie Johnson, Sunday Times, 11.31.1993.
28 Alton Herald, 1.29.1993.
29 The Times, 6.23.1997.
30 Alton Herald, 1.29.1993.
31 Alton Herald, 2.4.1993.
32 For example, see “Horse rippers run to ground”, The Observer,
11.12.1997.
33 “Horse hit by attack”, Alton Herald, 7.3.1992; The Times,
1.5.1993.
34 The Times, 2.6.1993.
35 The Observer, 11.12.1997.
36 Alton Herald, 1.29.1993, p.1.
37 Alton Herald, 1.29.1993, p. 2.
38 Daily Telegraph, 3.6.1996.
39 The Sunday Times, 2.6.1993
40 ibid.
41 Alton Herald, 1.29.1993, p. 1.
42 Alton Herald, 1.29.1993, p.2.
43 The Times, 1.25.1993.
44 Sunday Times, 11.31.1993.
45 The Times, 2.6.1993.
46 Sunday Times, 1.31.1993, p.31. In Germany it appears that
horse attackers may be charged with “animal torture”, which has
a maximum sentence of two-years imprisonment (The Times,
8.2.1997, p.16).
47 Daly (1973, p.118) has also alluded to the transportability
of victimhood. In a case of sexual assault, for example, the
victim is sometimes seen as an abused woman’s spouse. However,
this shared victimhood is often derived not from a male’s
assumed empathy towards a woman’s suffering, but from how his
property has been damaged or polluted by sexual assault, thereby
depicting him - the property owner - as the real victim.
48 Alton Herald, 7.10.1992.
49 Alton Herald, 7.3.1992.
50 ibid.
51 Alton Herald, 1.29.1993.
52 Ministers of the European Union also agreed in 1997 to adopt
a legally-binding Protocol which transferred the status of
animals from “goods” or “agricultural products” to that of
“sentient beings” (D’Silva, 1997. p.6).
53 See Protocol (no.33) on the protection and welfare of animals
(1997) annexed to the Treaty establishing the European
Community.
54 Some commentators have noted with irony that, while
corporations and cities may be regarded as persons in law,
animals other than human are not. Further, ‘the law...can, if it
choses, create persons’ (Midgley, 1985, p.54).
55 Alton Herald, 1.29.1993
56 Personal interview of a Horsewatch representative by Chris
Powell, 7.30.1998.
57 Borden Times & Mail, 2.2.1993.
59 Angie Johnson, Sunday Times, 10.3.1993.
60 For example, see the front page report “Home Counties horse
owners mount a 24hr guard against attackers” (The Times,
6.2.1993).
61 See further, for example, Beirne (1995;1999). Of all the
media commentaries on the horse assaults, only Professor Andrew
Linzey seems to have addressed this wider context. He stated
that the assaults must be understood in the context of horses
being regarded as “little more than things” in Christian thought
(The Times, 6.23.1997).
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