Encounters: The UFO Phenomenon, Exposed!/Encounters - The UFO Phenomenon, Exposed (1995).iso/misc2/misc041.txt

Text File | 1995-10-20 | 5KB | 108 lines

HORSE HORROR:  MORE THAN 30 ATTACKED SAVAGELY THROUGHOUT ENGLAND

by John Danton
   New York Times, (c) 1993

Alton, England.  This is a lush country.  Gently rolling hills and
valleys are bathed in the blossoms of foxglove and honeysuckle and
Jacob's ladder, and the green of the fields is so bright it shimmers
over everything--the sheep, the winding wooden fences, the stonge
farmhouses and red-brick cottages.

But something is wrong in Hampshire.  Over the past three years, more
than 30 horses have been attacked savagely.  The attacks, which
actually date back more than 10 years but now are occurring more often
and turning fatal, have happened in open fields and inside stables,
in broad daylight and on moonlit nights.

In at least half the cases, the horses genitalia have been slashed or
mutilated.

The police have set up an "incidents room" with 10 officers, who have
handled 3,800 frantic calls, employed a computer to search for
patterns in the crimes, and turned to a psychiatrist to come up with
a psychological profile.  They arrested numerous people to question
them--27 at last count, all men--and turned information over to the
crown prosecutor in one case.

But still the sadistic attacks continue.  They have sown panic among
the owners of 55,000 horses in the country.  Even more distressing,
they have multiplied through what police believe are copycat attackers
and spread to other countries.  There have now been attacks on horses
in Berkshire, Buckinghamshire, Cornwall, Dorset, Essex, Glamorgan,
Kent, Oxfordshire, Shropshire, Surrey, Wiltshire, and Yorkshire.

"The attacks have become more and more horrible," Sally Grover said.
"And it's done by somebody who knows about horses.  We've had attacks
where the ovaries have been cut out in a mare, and not everyone knows
where the ovaries are," she said.

In March, Grover helped organize the Hampshire Horse Watch, part of
a growing network of horse owners who patrol one another's pastures
and paddocs on the lookout for suspicious strangers.

Who could be responsible for the attacks?  "I've no idea, Grover said.
"Who could get inside a mind like that?  It's the same sort of a
person who would murder a child."

Nearby, Betty Cabrol, who lives in a cottage bedecked with flowers,
was having tea with a female crime prevention officer.  They were
theorizing about the attacks.

"What we're sure of, it's a horse person," she said.  "To be able to
control them like that , you need a certain knowledge.  What's hard
to understand is how anyone could be so strong and so quick."  The
policewoman said gently, "If we had a pattern to it, that would help.
But there's no pattern."

Dr Richard Ryder, head of the Royal Society for the Prevention of
Cruelty to Animals, also is a psychologist.  As in Peter Shaffer's
1973 play, "Equus", in which a stable boy worships and blinds horses
in a sexual frenzy, he sees patients "with a sexual interest in
horses--both men and women."

Turning to the Hampshire case, he said, "The possibilities range from
someone who is relatively normal, acting out a revenge for some
perceived slight--say, a groom was fired perhaps--to a pranoid
psychotic who has delusions about horses and believes they are deeply
threatening and, of course, with sexual perversion along the line."

His analysis fits in with the thinking of the police.  They think some
of the "attacks" are everyday natural accidents magnified by hysteria.
But they don't deny the existence of a "horse ripper" and feel he is
among the six men they already have questioned.  One case is
especially strong, they say.

"My view is, I'm reasonably confident we've spoken to him," said
Detective Chief Inspector Des Thomas, who heads the probe. Thomas is
an expert on horse abuse, reading up on everything from the
"hamstringing" done by villagers to vex local squires 200 years ago
to Patagonian practices.

And the motive?  "You have people who rape a woman and then turn
against the woman for what they've done," Thomas said.  "Here we may
have a person who has sexual attraction to a horse who then feels
disgusted with himself."

John Archer, author of "By a Flash and a Scare: Incendiarism and
Animal Maiming 1815-1870," says animal maiming isn't new.

Historically horse attacks occurred during economic stress, he said,
like the 1849-1852 agricultural depression, and were thought to
contain an element of class revenge, since "horses were viewed as
symbols of wealth.  Of course that wouldn't explain the sexual
attacks.  Nowadays the psychiatric explanations move to the fore."

"Maybe a lot of these horses are owned by wealthy people, young girls
riding through the villages.  Before you had an act of symbolic
murder, transferred murder.  The laborer couldn't actually murder the
large landowner so he got the horse.  Could this be a case of
transferred rape?"


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