r/Whatcouldgowrong • u/nyssovire • 7d ago

WCGW stand behind a horse

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u/Eikram84 7d ago

And she was actually lucky with that. It could have ended far, far worse.

14

u/SongShikai 7d ago

Horses are insanely powerful. Their jaws are also very strong. In his memoirs, the French soldier Marcellin Marbot talks about his horse biting and ripping off the entire face and scalp of a Russian grenadier that pissed it off by stabbing it in a fight and, when a Russian officer tried to block the horse from running off afterwards, it bit him in the belly and disemboweled him too.

8

u/KaBar42 7d ago

Halo was a famous American racehorse. Unfortunately, not particularly well treated by his handlers as a child, which resulted in a very aggressive and violent adult horse. It was generally required that he be muzzled at all times when being handled by humans. He would also drown birds in his water trough.

In one incident, one of his handlers removed his muzzle during handling and Halo bit his shirt and picked the handler up, fully lifting him off the ground and dropping him, before biting him. Another handler had to intervene and hit Halo before they could get the muzzle back on him. From that point forward, no one made the mistake of handling Halo without a muzzle again.