Us humans like to look at things we didn’t expect to see. Anything from car crashes to murder victims, it’s an odd habit that I doubt we’ll ever lose. The bad old days of the freak show are behind us (unless you count Big Brother, Come Dine With Me, The Undatables, UFC, My Gypsy Wedding, Hoarder Next Door, Snog Marry Avoid, the Kardashians etc. etc.) but our penchant for oddities is never far away.
In the mid 1880’s horse diving, the brain child of William “Doc” Carver, drew quite a crowd. As the name suggests a horse would be ridden up a slope to a height of around 60 feet and then dive off into the water below. William “Doc” Carver came up with the idea when a bridge he was riding across collapsed and his horse leapt/fell into the waters below. A stroke of genius.
Carver trained up some horses, and off on tour he went. His partner, Al Floyd Carver, constructed the ramp and tower and his rider Lorena Carver was the first ever dare-devil horse diver.
Another rider Sonora Webster joined the show in 1924 with her horse “red lips”. Despite falling off the platform, detaching her retinas and being rendered completely blind, she still continued to ride up the ramp to the rapturous roar of the crowd.
As you can imagine the animal cruelty brigade were rightly up in arms and after WWII the attraction steadily lost momentum thanks to the sensibly bad vibes. There were rumours that electrified prods and other methods were used to coerce the horses during training. Eventually the sport came to an end.
Surprisingly there was a fairly recent attempt to revive the “tradition” but in modern times that sort of thing really isn’t likely to be well received. I mean, people even get upset when we try lipstick on rabbits nowadays (I jest of course). Still, in the early 90’s they had another go:
The “Steel Pier” was petitioned and the diving horses were finally put to bed. The president of the Humane Society of the United States put it rather succinctly:
This is a merciful end to a colossally stupid idea.
Exactly.
