Burying a dead horse

Horses have a pretty ignominious history at the movies. 

You've got your obvious examples, like the one whose head appeared in a bed in The Godfather. But you've got plenty of niche examples as well, like the horse that gets vivisected in The Cell, or the one that turns into a Gloomy Gus and just submits meekly to a pit of quicksand in The Neverending Story. Then of course you've got all those hundreds upon thousands of horses who had to wipe out spectacularly to make the climax of a western more exciting.

Rarely have I stopped to think what actually happened to these horses, because the answer, in most cases, is not much. Of course that's a fake horse head in The Godfather. Of course that's a digital horse in The Cell. And even though the history of animal welfare on the sets of westerns is undoubtedly shameful, I have to imagine most of those horses were trained to fall so as not to sustain a fatal leg break, and probably received a nice tasty treat as a reward.

On Monday night I saw a movie, though, that made me wonder about one particular horse -- not because I thought it was hurt or killed as part of the movie, but because I thought it might have been dead already.

Minor spoilers to follow about The Nest.

The Nest features a family of Jude Law, Carrie Coon, their son together and her daughter from a previous marriage, who move together to London to try to suck the marrow of whatever 80s capitalism has to offer. It doesn't go that well. And part of that is that Coon's horse, whose welfare she has been neglecting with her mind on the dissolution of her family, pulls up lame and has to be put down.

Of course, it's possible to realistically shoot a horse in a movie -- just think of that crazy tracking shot in Atonement -- and this was on the far easier end of such an illusion. Coon's character walks away as a local farmer lets that single shot ring out. I don't even remember if we see the horse's head twitch or anything. Easy peasy.

It was a scene that followed that made me really wonder.

For as many horses as we have seen meeting their untimely demise in a movie, I don't ever recall seeing the aftermath. Just as I was wondering what you actually do with a dead horse -- do you chop it up into smaller pieces for easier transport? -- the movie provided me the answer. A piece of large construction/farming equipment comes along with its bucket, lifts the carcass and drops it into a hole in the ground on Coon and Law's property, which the same piece of equipment had presumably already dug. The body flops into the grave with a very believable sort of horse rigor mortis realism.

You would think you'd need to manufacture an artificial horse carcass for this scene, but then I wondered. 

Putting down horses seems, sadly, to be a very regular part of their lives. I don't pretend to understand what types of injuries horses can survive and what they can't come back from, but sometimes I feel like it's few of the former and quite a lot of the latter. I still remember this one instance of the running of a local horse race here in Victoria, the Melbourne Cup, a race so important to local culture it has its own holiday associated with it. This one particular year, not one but two horses had to be put down that day as a result of falling during the race -- and one of them was the one who had come in as the odds-on favorite to win the whole thing. Absolutely brutal.

Horses don't only get put down from race disasters. I think that thing where their hoof starts to come off, or turn sideways, is also fatal. I feel like farms with horses might have to put them down regularly too.

So if you need a horse corpse for a movie, can you just wait for one of these regular occurrences to happen naturally? 

Is that ethical? Is it practical? Is it considered in awfully poor taste for a horse's final act to be appearing as a horse corpse in a movie? Or does that weirdly commit it to some kind of permanence?

I did a little light googling of this, without getting an answer. I guess part of me doesn't want to know the answer, because then I couldn't write a post like this. I'd just know the answer and there would be no point to speculate about it.

Because that sure did look like a real dead horse they were burying in The Nest.

And then again, I guess the next question is, if you can make a dead horse that looks as real as that, how hard is it to do, and how much time and money does it take?

If you know the answers to any of these questions, please leave them in the comments. Of course, if you are just one of the many people out there who doesn't know anything about the methods for depicting dead horses on film, then just move along.