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Straight from the horse’s mouth: What the Roy Moore horseback footage reveals
When the video of failed senatorial candidate Roy Moore leaving the Alabama polling station on horseback popped up in my Twitter feed, I was absolutely riveted. I knew instantaneously that there were two sets of people watching the footage: those without any equestrian experience who would make what they would of the video, and riders like myself, who would understand that they were effectively watching a confession.
In comparison to women’s voices (which claim, and cry, and nag), domestic animals are the ne plus ultra in sweet complicity. Wet of nose and wide of eye, there’s no tattling or telling. Animals are honor bound to keep their owners’ secrets because they cannot speak.
Alleged sexual predator Roy Moore probably thought he had the perfect accomplice in his gaited Tennessee walking horse, Sassy — a breed developed in the southern United States for both pleasure riding and farm work, the personification of good old boy patriotism itself. A white, affluent American man taking to the polls on a horse that was used for generations on southern plantations — how virile, how on-brand. Bonus points for Sassy’s good looks and convenient muteness.
Unfortunately for Moore, however, horses’ body language is renownedly intelligible. Any horse person in the universe…
