The Crash of Horseflesh
[posted by Gavin Robinson, 3:29 pm, 10 May 2010]
After yet more digging for evidence of horse collisions I’ve found some new examples and more sources for some that I already knew about. Maybe in a perfect world I wouldn’t need to do this because everyone would just accept that shock charges are a stupid idea (as I’ve argued in lots of blog posts before, although I’ve changed my mind about some of the details), but maybe a world in which everyone accepted things without evidence wouldn’t really be all that perfect. I’m increasingly aware that old arguments against shock (eg John Keegan in The Face of Battle) are just as prone to woolly thinking, special pleading and vague appeals to “common sense” as the arguments for it. Instead of appealing to the authority of one historian’s common sense to disprove another historian’s common sense I need to appeal to the authority of science and real-world examples. Speculation about what “would” happen looks pretty worthless next to video footage of what did happen. In any case I find this research interesting and fun (despite the fact that it focuses on horrible things happening to horses and people!).
First, a new one that I haven’t mentioned before. Thursday 16 June 1994 (ladies’ day) at Royal Ascot. In the fifth race (the Ribblesdale Stakes), Papago ridden by Mick Kinane was trailing the field at the furlong post when a drunk spectator (James Florey) ran across course. The horse ran into him, knocked him down and rolled over, unseating the jockey. Although horse and jockey ended up on the floor they weren’t injured. Florey was taken to hospital. Initial reports said that his condition was serious, and he was later said to have suffered cuts and bruises, but apparently the only long-term result of the incident was that he was warned off British racecourses for five years by the Jockey Club.
YouTube has BBC footage of the accident in slow motion looking down the course, which gives a good view of what happened. It looks like the horse saw the spectator coming in from his right and tried to duck out to the left but this just kept him going towards the spectator who hadn’t seen the horse and carried on running straight across the track. The horse hit him and tripped over head first. There are also a couple of reports in The Independent from 17 June and 9 September.
A weird thing about this one is that I must have known about it at the time but I’d completely forgotten about it. I was really into racing at that time, watched it on TV whenever I could, and bought the Racing Post quite frequently. I even went to Ascot the day after the accident – I was there when Lochsong won the King’s Stand Stakes. And this was just after I’d started work on my undergraduate dissertation, which was all about cavalry, so it’s not like I wasn’t primed to look out for collisions. It just shows that memories are unreliable.
Churchill Downs, Kentucky, 26 April 2009. During an exercise period at the Kentucky Derby meeting, Doctor Rap unseated his rider and galloped into Raspberry Kiss, who was standing on the track. Raspberry Kiss was knocked over and was later put down because of a broken pelvis (or possibly died of shock just before she was due to be put down – reports are contradictory); Doctor Rap fell on top of her and suffered a bone bruise which will probably stop him from racing again. I tried to find out about this accident last year but things got confusing because many news reports got the names of one or both horses wrong! Thanks to the Thoroughbred Database, which gives pedigrees for thoroughbred horses, I’ve confirmed the correct names of the horses:
- Raspberry Kiss (USA) foaled 2007, by Champali (USA), out of Lucky Sheikh (USA)
- Doctor Rap (USA) foaled 2006, by Smarty Jones (USA), out of Carly’s Crown (USA)
Some sources gave the names as Dr Rap and Raspberry Miss, but there are no records of any thoroughbred racehorses with these names.
NBC Chicago has a video of the accident which gives a good view of what happened. Doctor Rap approached Raspberry Kiss from behind and hit her left side. She fell and rolled over, throwing her jockey off. Doctor Rap came down on top of her and neither horse could get up. They are still lying on the ground at the end of the video, over 30 seconds after the impact. The Courier-Journal (Louisville, KY) and New York Daily News give reports of the accident which seem to have the facts straight.
Prescott Downs, Arizona, 26 August 2000. I’ve written about this one before but now I have some reports from the Prescott Daily Courier from 30 November 2000 and16 July 2003 giving reliable details. This is the one where Pacific Wind unseated his rider, galloped the wrong way around the track, and collided head on with Lot O Love, ridden by Stacey Burton. Both horses were knocked over and killed, and Burton was in coma for 23 days and suffered permanent brain damage. That’s what happens when you maximize the shock of impact.
Finally, I came across a YouTube video of an accident in Turkey. I haven’t been able to find any background information about this, and it’s not likely that I will because there isn’t much to go on. It seems to be some kind of display related to the history of the Ottomans. The grey horse gallops into the black horse which is standing still. The grey is knocked over and doesn’t get up. I’d guess it probably had to be put down. The video shows horse and rider lying on the ground for nearly two minutes after the collision, and at the end they don’t look like they’re going to get up and walk away. The black horse did walk away and doesn’t seem to be too badly hurt. Because the accident is a long way from the camera, and the quality of the video isn’t too good, it’s hard to see exactly what happened. It looks like the black horse probably regained its balance, but it’s very clear that its rider was knocked off very suddenly. I don’t think anyone could have sat on through that.
So, more proof that crashing horses into each other, or into people, is a bad idea. Don’t do it kids…
Comment by Zebee` — 10:58 pm, 10 May 2010 [permanent link to this comment]
In the first set of footage it looks like the horse tried to duck and lost footing before it actually hit the runner. You can see the left foreleg losing traction and bending while the runner is still fractionally to the horse’s right.
Which makes sense, at that speed a sudden swerve isn’t going to work well, especially if the track is at all wet.
Comment by Ian MacInnes — 1:26 pm, 2 June 2010 [permanent link to this comment]
Given the obvious dangers of running your horse into objects, I’ve always wondered what a “charge” really means. I know that jousting required shock, but it’s distributed over the body of the horse by the harness, and since the horses are separated from each other by the fence and keep moving after the impact, the shock is obviously greater for the riders! But a cavalry charge? If you’re galloping at a bunch of guys standing around (or worse, sitting around on their own horses), doesn’t it seem likely that a lot of dangerous collisions are going to happen? Or are horses as good as humans are at avoiding direct impact? Did charges against formed troops basically mean just covering the distance to them quickly, then reining in and approaching slowly? I’m a confused literary critic here!
Comment by Gavin Robinson — 4:44 pm, 2 June 2010 [permanent link to this comment]
It’s easy to be confused about this, especially when so many military historians assume (or even insist) that the object of a cavalry charge was to crash your horses into the enemy. I’m working on an article which should help to kill this myth (but probably won’t!) and I’ve got lots of previous blog posts on the topic (see the “cavalry charges” tag). I’m also planning some posts on the physics of cavalry combat. This is a summary of what I think so far:
With lances (both in jousting and combat) the speed and weight of the horse put the necessary force behind the lance, but the force was concentrated into a very small area by the point of the lance, which could put sufficient stress on enemy armour/bodies without being too dangerous to the man using the lance. Lances were designed to absorb some of the shock by bending and breaking – more so in jousting, but this also happened in battles. Pro and anti lance theorists in the 16th century both seem to have assumed that the lance would break in the first charge. I think that rather than maximizing the shock of impact, lancers would have to control their approach very carefully to get just the right amount of force behind the lance.
In the late 16th/early 17th century the heavy lance was abandoned. According to Clifford Rogers this was because improvements in metallurgy meant that plate armour could only be pierced by firearms. I assume that if lances could have been made to exert the necessary force (eg by increasing the speed of attack) it would have been too dangerous to the user.
In the English Civil War cavalry often charged into close combat with each other, but I haven’t found any evidence that this involved collisions of walls of horses, or that anyone at the time thought this was a good idea. When cavalry charged each other without lances in this and later periods, the usual outcomes were that one side would run away before contact was made, both sides would pass through each other, or they would stop and engage in hand to hand combat. It’s likely that with so many horses and so much stress there would have been some accidental collisions, but I can’t find direct evidence of them.
In the 18th and 19th centuries the theory of shock (ie crashing your horses into the enemy) was very widespread but there’s little reliable evidence of it happening in practice. I can say for certain that if it could be done it wouldn’t give any advantage, because Newton’s third law says that the force of a collision is equal for both bodies (calculating the magnitude of the force is surprisingly tricky but it’s always guaranteed to be equal on both sides). I suspect that the theory persisted because no-one could actually do a shock charge and therefore never found out what would happen if they did. I also suspect that the theory was based on some kind of folk memory of heavy lancers, but the weird thing is that it went underground in the 17th century.
Attacking the enemy at speed could have had the benefits of intimidating the enemy into running away, increasing the confidence of your own cavalry, and spending less time under enemy fire, but it’s not clear whether these were the real reasons for charges or just side effects of charges undertaken for other (spurious) reasons.
Cavalry vs infantry is a bit different. When infantry used pikes it was virtually impossible for cavalry to do anything to them. This led to Reiters using pistols, which were effective against unsupported pikemen, but the “caracole” tactic is often assumed (probably wrongly) to have been used against cavalry as well. After the pike was abandoned it was still difficult for cavalry to do anything to infantry, but it only took a collision of one horse to throw an infantry formation into confusion. Therefore we can’t rule out cavalry deciding to try and sacrifice one or two horses to break an infantry square, but this was still hard to achieve as horses don’t like running into things.
Comment by Henchminion — 10:01 pm, 4 July 2010 [permanent link to this comment]
Here’s another video for your collection, fresh from last weekend’s G20 protests in Toronto. It makes me wonder if there isn’t more than one way to crash a horse into a pedestrian. Trampling him would likely trip the horse, but body-checking him like a hockey player seems to work just fine. Admittedly, this horse was only moving at a brisk trot and the pedestrian was facing away from the ‘charge’.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5-p64RHqi38
Comment by Gavin Robinson — 3:51 pm, 6 July 2010 [permanent link to this comment]
That’s an interesting one. I’m increasingly thinking that if deliberately crashing horses was a viable tactic it would have to be done slowly and carefully, which is still a major problem for historians who like to talk about maximizing the shock of impact.
Comment by Megan — 4:00 pm, 7 October 2010 [permanent link to this comment]
I just stumbled across your blog, and wanted to mention that you might want to look at polo while you’re researching this topic.
I played for five years in college, and slamming your horse into another horse is a necessary part of strategy. It’s not perfectly analogous, since, due to safety regulations, you are supposed to “bump” or “ride off” only laterally, meeting the other horse shoulder-to-shoulder while traveling in the same direction and at approximately equal angles and speeds.
Still, horses do run into each other, on accident or at the urging of their rider, in other configurations. This happens often enough that most of the rules of (intercollegiate, at least) polo are aimed at preventing “t-bone” type collisions, by stipulating that a player can’t cross in front of other players if it would be dangerous to do so. T-boning itself is a major foul.
I haven’t seen horses run into each other head-on, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen.
For arena (indoor) polo, we also train horses to run directly towards the wall, pulling them up short and making sure they stay perpendicular to the wall as they halt. This is so they don’t duck out at the last minute and cause a collision with another horse moving towards the wall. The well-trained ponies would absolutely run straight into the wall if you didn’t pull them up (though it would also be a foul to let your horse do that in a game).
That being said, I’m not sure it negates your argument, as such collisions with the wall or non-legal collisions with other horses generally result in at least minor injuries to the horse, and the risk increases as the speed does. I just thought it might be worth looking into, in addition to racing and other horse collisions.
This isn’t the best video, but there are some cringe-worthy collisions here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W7q5G_r_q7U&feature=related. See especially the one around 0:35, where one horse crashes into the hindquarters of another.
Comment by Gavin Robinson — 10:15 am, 10 October 2010 [permanent link to this comment]
Thanks for your comment. This is all really interesting and useful. I haven’t posted the most recent version of my argument because I’m preparing it for journal publication. I’m increasingly moving away from the question of whether horses could crash into each other and focusing more on what was likely to happen if they did, as that makes a stronger argument which doesn’t rely so much on anecdotal evidence or “common sense”. Compared to when I started looking at this issue, I’m coming round more to thinking that some collisions probably did happen. Given the numbers of horses and general confusion on early modern battlefields, and the horse’s blind spot straight ahead, accidental collisions seem quite probable, although I don’t know how to quantify the probability. I now tend to accept that horses could be made to crash into each other deliberately given enough training, but that would probably be self-defeating because if they managed to do it they’d waste all that training by killing themselves. The sacrifice would have been worth it against infantry, because it only took one horse to break a formation, but against other cavalry there probably wouldn’t be any net gain because it would just be sacrificing one of your own horses to take out one of the enemy’s horses.
In some ways polo is a whole different (metaphorical) ball game from a cavalry charge because it’s a (literal) ball game. The point of bumping is to get an advantageous position in relation to the ball and/or deny that position to opponents, whereas in a battle the object is to kill, disable or intimidate the enemy. I can’t see this kind of bumping giving the advantage claimed by the historians I’m arguing against. But polo is more analogous to the close combat that followed a charge if neither side ran away and they didn’t just pass through each other. The cavalry could spend some time fighting as individuals or small groups using swords and pistols, and I think John Keegan compared it to an aerial dogfight. In that situation pushing enemies out of the way with your horse can help to get you out of danger or into a good position to attack someone else. Contemporary descriptions of English Civil War combat do mention horses pushing against each other during the melee.