At 09:39 AM 2/14/05 -0000, Margery Allcock wrote: >I imagine these horses were very much like people <G> ... the females >weren't all that warlike, so were kept at home to breed, while the males >were kept entire (not gelded) and their testosterone made them usefully >fierce and eager to join in the battles.
If I recall correctly, mares and geldings were preferred for war mounts -- because a mare in heat wouldn't break their concentration. [hoof code absent-mindedly snipped] at http://www.snopes.com/military/statue.htm I find: ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Claim: The number of hooves lifted into the air on equestrian statues reveals how the riders died. Status: False. Origins: Folk wisdom has it that equestrian statues contain a code whereby the rider's fate can be determined by noting how many hooves the horse has raised. The most common theory has it that if one hoof is raised, the rider was wounded in battle (possibly dying of those wounds later but not necessarily so); two raised hooves, death in battle; all four hooves on the ground, the rider survived all battles unharmed. . . . Given that the alleged statuary code consists of three poses (no hooves raised, one hoof raised, and two hooves raised), the odds that a rider's manner of death would correspond to his horse's pose through plain chance are one in three, which is the proportion we find when surveying the equestrian statues in our nation's capital — that is, only about ten out of thirty statues in Washington, D.C., follow the "traditional" pattern. . . . The connection between statuary horses hooves' and the manner of deaths of their riders is not "tradition," but — like the well-known but mundane list of "coincidences" between the Lincoln and Kennedy assassinations — an attempt to create an interesting piece of information (in this case, something akin to a "secret code") by finding patterns in randomness through the expedient of simply ignoring or explaining away all the cases that don't fit the pattern. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ (Wearing my BuHead of the Writers' [criticism] Exchange hat: she should transpose "explaining away" and "simply ignoring".) But if we believe in the code firmly enough, sculptors will begin to follow it. Bit late to enforce it -- equestrian statues for war heros have gone out of style. -- Joy Beeson http://home.earthlink.net/~joybeeson/ http://home.earthlink.net/~dbeeson594/ROUGHSEW/ROUGH.HTM http://home.earthlink.net/~beeson_n3f/ west of Fort Wayne, Indiana, U.S.A. where rain washed all the snow into the lake last night. Ice is bare, but still holding. To unsubscribe send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] containing the line: unsubscribe lace-chat [EMAIL PROTECTED] For help, write to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
