Synopsis
There is widespread belief in a warm and comforting story which states the horse is a gentle herbivore. What if a Rosetta Stone had been found to unlock the dark secrets of the horse's past? An international multi-million dollar industry serviced by horse whisperers, glossy magazines and popular culture preaches that horses are meek prey animals who fear predators. What if evidence demonstrated horses have slain lions, tigers, pumas, wolves, hyenas and humans? Contemporary writers have successfully airbrushed murderous and meat-eating horses out of literature. What if Shakespeare, Sherlock Holmes and Steve McQueen provided artistic evidence to refute that claim? Thanks to global equestrian amnesia, the crucial role played by horses in recent history has been lost to mankind. What if testimony revealed meat-eating horses had been used to explore the Poles and photographs had been discovered of Tibet's blood-eating horses? Deadly Equines is a revolutionary departure from equestrian romance. It is a fact-filled analysis which reveals how humanity has known about meat-eating horses for at least four thousand years, during which time horses have consumed nearly two dozen different types of protein, including human flesh, and that these episodes have occurred on every continent, including Antarctica. Various sources of corroborating data, including legends, literature, cinema, news stories, scientific reports and eyewitness accounts are presented for the reader's investigation. None of these items had been hidden. They were ignored, misinterpreted or, in some cases, censored. The result is the first exploration of the horse's hidden history, an alternative equestrian world populated by forgotten facts, overlooked evidence and astonishing stories. Amply illustrated, and containing a map of occurrences, this study challenges the reader to develop a new understanding of the horse, one based upon reason, not fantasy.
About the Author
CuChullaine O'Reilly is an investigative reporter who has spent more than thirty years studying equestrian travel techniques on every continent. After having made lengthy trips by horseback across Pakistan, he was made a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society and the Explorers' Club. O'Reilly is also the author of Khyber Knights. This equestrian travel tale has been described as a "masterpiece" and the author as "Jack London in our time".
O'Reilly founded the Long Riders' Guild, the world's first inter-national association of equestrian explorers. The organization has Members in forty-two countries, all of whom have made a qualifying equestrian journey of at least one thousand miles. The Guild has supported more than a hundred equestrian expeditions on every continent except Antarctica.
The author and his wife are the webmasters of The Long Riders' Guild website. At three-thousand plus pages, and still growing, and having now been visited by more than three million people world-wide, this website is the repository of the largest collection of equestrian travel information in human history.
After ten years of unparalleled intellectual growth, The Long Riders' Guild became a movement for change in the wider equestrian world when the O'Reillys launched The Long Riders' Guild Academic Foundation. The world's first open-source academic equine website is devoted to the study of all hippological arts and sciences and provides a forum, free of commercial influence, wherein equine-related articles are provided at no cost to scholars, students and equine enthusiasts. Every type of horse-related knowledge is being investigated and published at this exciting website, whose motto is "Science not Superstition."
Deadly Equines is the first title in a new series of equestrian investigations undertaken by the author.
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