What the strange case of horse mutilations in France reveals about our state of mind
The animals have been found missing ears and genitals, with eyes torn out, or deep, clean cuts to their bodies. The recent spate of horse mutilations reported across France has provoked horror and outrage. Satanic cults have been mooted, or individual perpetrators engaged in copycat crimes. But what if the panic reveals more about our collective state of mind in 2020 than any new and twisted form of human behaviour?
The reports started trickling in in January, but they picked up dramatically over the summer, until they were providing a sinister drumbeat to an already strange holiday season in France. Around 150 investigations of animal cruelty are under way, in more than half the country’s 96 metropolitan departments. Internet sleuths put the number of incidents closer to 200.
The outpouring of emotion on social media has been accompanied by efforts to organise vigils and share photos of vehicles lurking suspiciously close to fields and stables. On 7 September, the minister of the interior, Gérald Darmanin, visited horse breeders in the northern department of the Oise and warned them not to take justice into their own hands. Two days later, the minister for agriculture, Julien Denormandie, announced that a dedicated phone line had been set up, where breeders could report incidents. One man has been arrested, but he was released after his alibi checked out. By then, a photofit portrait of him had been shared nearly 500,000 times on Facebook.
Not that those on Facebook are listening, but a few quiet voices have raised the possibility that no one is responsible for the shocking injuries. On 3 September, Le Monde pointed out that they could be a natural phenomenon – horses that have hurt themselves or died naturally and been set upon by scavengers such as foxes and crows. Previous scares, from the US to Germany, have eventually been explained this way. In the UK, in the decade from 1983, a rash of horse mutilations was widely blamed on a “horse ripper”, but despite prolonged investigations no conviction was ever made. Experts concluded that most of the injuries were sustained through accident or post mortem. A fox’s teeth are razor sharp, apparently; they can inflict damage that closely resembles a knife wound.
If you were to approach the problem scientifically, you might start by asking how many horses are found mutilated in France in an average year, and measure excess mortality in 2020 – just as epidemiologists have done throughout the pandemic. That would give you an indication of whether there is anything unusual about this year. If there is, you would then raise a number of hypotheses to try to explain the increase, and investigate them methodically. This is what vets did in Botswana, where they have been investigating a mysterious “die-off ” of elephants. Having ruled out poachers and a virus spread by rodents, their investigations pointed them to toxic algal blooms. Rising temperatures have made these increasingly common in the waterholes elephants frequent.
In France, to date, investigators seem to have made the classic error – the staple of many crime dramas but also of real-life miscarriages of justice – of zeroing in too fast on a single hypothesis. Nobody even seems to know if the number of mutilations noted this year represents a departure from the norm. Instead, ministers have asked the public to be vigilant – ensuring heightened attention to the phenomenon – and spoken of barbarians and justice. It’s hard not to see a vicious cycle at work: the number of reports increases; ministers respond with promises to catch the culprits, with the public’s help; the reports increase again.
Perpetrators with mental health issues could certainly be one hypothesis in the current situation. Phil Kavanagh, a clinical psychologist at the University of Canberra in Australia who has written about animal cruelty, says the mutilations could point to someone suffering from psychosis – like the boy who, according to a possibly apocryphal story, blinded six horses in Suffolk and inspired Peter Shaffer to write his play Equus (1973). But the French cases cover a huge geographical area. Kavanagh doubts one person could be responsible for them all and knows of no precedents of psychotic individuals organising themselves into groups. In fact, he says, there has been very little research on animal cruelty, though myths about it abound. One is the so-called Macdonald triad – the idea that there is an association between bedwetting beyond a certain age, fire-setting and cruelty to animals, and that this predicts later violence against people. First proposed in the 1960s, based on a small-scale study, the Macdonald triad has failed to stand up to scientific scrutiny.
Why have French investigators focused their efforts on a single, tenuous theory to the exclusion of all others? Perhaps it isn’t so surprising, given French people’s state of mind – and not just theirs. For months, while the pandemic has raged, we’ve all absorbed a steady stream of chatter about deep state intrigue and “foreign interference”. A crazy theory that Donald Trump is doing battle with a ring of Satan-worshipping paedophiles, which had its origins in the US, is gaining ground in Europe, including in France and the UK.
Some conspiracies are real. A trial is ongoing in Paris of suspects in the terrorist attacks of 2015. But there is also a close association between belief in conspiracies and seeing patterns where they don’t exist. The case of the mutilated horses may constitute a crime, or it may be one more illusory pattern jumping out at a world on edge, primed to see the wood and not the trees. If it’s the latter, the dangers are twofold: that innocent people will be punished, and that the real cause will go undiscovered. The only way forward is to keep an open mind, and to follow the data.
• Laura Spinney is a science journalist and author. Her latest book is Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How it Changed the World
elected. So it has felt really urgent to work on a wider scale beyond that personal level, to focus on what we all should be talking about and working towards.”
The first gay rodeo happened in the mid-1970s, as one of the more creative fundraisers by the Imperial Court System. This pioneering LGBT nonprofit, now the second-largest in the US, uses charitable fundraising to build ties with communities. It is still run entirely by volunteers, on whom fanciful titles are bestowed. In 1975, Phil Ragsdale, then Emperor I of Reno, threw a benefit for a senior citizens Thanksgiving dinner. More than 100 people took part in this gay rodeo, as well as five cows, 10 calves, one pig and a Shetland pony. A King, a Queen and a Miss Dusty Spurs (the drag queen category) were crowned, and history was made.
Today, the International Gay Rodeo Association (IGRA) has 15 member groups across the US, with one more in the Canadian Rockies. After meeting the Californian chapter, Gilford began saving up, planning to hit the circuit. “I was living in New York at the time. So I would fly to the south-west, rent a truck then travel around – to New Mexico,
Utah, Colorado.”
The project is mostly portraiture, often close-up, with some shots against the backdrop of those fabled big skies and endless expanses. And Gilford was no outsider looking in: he clearly saw himself in the people he met. “We’re all from places that are still hostile to queerness.”
There is a lot of skin: shirtless torsos, a man shot from behind wearing little more than tasselled green chaps, a naked couple on a horse. But it isn’t erotica. In one particularly tender shot, a man in jeans and blue plaid rests his hand on his partner’s back, underneath the latter’s pale checkered shirt. “How often do you see something like that?” says Gilford. “Gay cowboys have long been fetishised in pornography, as in art, but this was completely authentic. It’s a real community. These are real lovers.”
Creating the pictures was a way for him to listen to people’s stories, to see their scars, to discover their beauty and contentment. “Usually when we hear about rural queerness it’s in a negative way,” he says. “It’s like something bad has happened – it’s the Matthew Shepard story. We don’t have examples, really, in pop culture of people who are queer and living real lives and living their best life.”
This certainly seems to apply to Priscilla Toya Bouvier – AKA Paul Vigil, AKA Miss IGRA 2019, AKA queer rodeo royalty – who frowns at the camera with thick, black lashes in a peach button down and turquoise beads, diamante crown catching the light of a low sun, sash festooned with as many buttons and badges as a piece of fabric can be. In another shot, an older white couple’s kiss is hidden by matching straw-coloured Stetsons. Bull-rider Lee, formerly known as Breana, holds up a bandaged right arm against a black sports bra, pale dirt and an even paler sky stretching out in the distance.
Lee is one of several portraits of people of colour, whose presence defies the commonly held misconception that rodeo – and by extension rural America – is exclusively white. It brings to mind the Compton Cowboys and other Black horsemen and women who rode through Houston and Oakland in a recent Black Lives Matter protest. Gilford points out that the queer rodeo is welcoming to anyone on the LGBTQIA + spectrum and beyond. “If you are black or brown or Asian and you do not feel safe in the mainstream rodeo spaces, you’re welcome at the queer rodeo, even if you’re not queer.”
He prizes this openness and doesn’t find it particularly common. “I’ve never totally identified with urban queer culture, which is about celebrating this escape, perhaps, from rural places. It’s about partying, consumerism, capitalism.” The queer rodeo world struck a different chord. “It is so much more about a connection to the land, to animals, to community.”
Gilford is best known for music videos and fashion spreads featuring glitzy showbiz high fliers: Lizzo, David Lynch, Christina Aguilera, as well as Fonda and Anderson. He doesn’t see this new work as a departure, though, given how full of spectacle and heightened emotion rodeo is. But he does think queer rodeo has a different energy to its straight counterpart. “Mainstream rodeo is so much more about danger and violence,” he says. “Here, it’s still a celebration, but one of love and care. Because these are people who have survived a certain kind of trauma and are now here to re-enact this traditional western performance, which is also a form of drag.”
The book opens with a quote by Black writer and trans rights activist Janet Mock about family as community, “a space where you don’t have to shrink yourself”. A couple of pages later, Gilford
riffs on this notion, saying that “one of the great powers of the queer rodeo is its ability to disrupt America’s tribal dichotomies that cannot contain who we really are – liberal versus conservative, urban versus rural, ‘coastal elite’ versus ‘middle America’”.
National Anthem has also helped him to accept who he really is, a queer child of rural south-west America, a fact that lends his project greater poignancy. It’s a homecoming of sorts, a return to the land, a metaphor, a dream. “It’s the future,” he says, “the America we all dream of, being able to be whatever we want to be.”
• National Anthem is published on 1 October by Damiani.