I was just flipping around the dial, and saw (McKenna’s Gold) an Indian lasso Gregory Peck and then drag him behind his horse at a full gallop over rough ground (sand, rocks, cactus, sagebrush) for about a quarter mile. It mussed up his hair. It reminded me of a question I had when I saw the bad guys do the same thing to Tom Selleck in “Quigley Down Under,” only they dragged him for what seemed a lot farther, and he got a lot dustier, with a few scrapes.
Wouldn’t that pretty much shred the front of your body, and just incidentally rip off the male parts? Exactly what kind of documentaries are these, anyway?
The most probable result would be death. possibly involving dismemberment.
I go to the rodeo and like to watch the barrel racers. These are usually girls or women riders, and they are running their horses full out as they circle 3 barrels. Anyway, as a 14 year old girl had just finished her run her horse stumbled and fell to the ground. The rider was able to survive her fall, but one of her boots became lodged in the stirrup.
The horse got up on all fours and panicked, as horses often do, and started running from one end of the arena to the other. The girl was dragged on the ground about 1000 feet before her foot fell out of the stirrup. She laid on the ground motionless, but within a minute or two she was up and limping toward her horse to lead it back into the corral. As I understand it, she felt well enough to compete in the next weekend’s rodeo.
So sometimes it can be fatal, and sometime riders appear to survive will little more than a scratch or sprain. Go figure.
People die from this. A friend of mine had a son that was hospitalized for over a month after being dragged behind a spooked horse. It’s different in a rodeo because the arena is groomed. There are no big rocks to hit your head on, no logs to bounce off of, no sticks to impale you.
The way it’s shown in the movies is fiction.
ETA: i’ve competed in team penning and wild horse races, and taken my share of falls. I know of what I speak. I’ve never gotten dragged, but I got a scare once when I got snagged and the horse stopped. It’s frightening.
I don’t think the movies showed ol’ Greg or Magnum hitting anything like cactii or boulders, did they?
Being dragged has a lot to do with the topography. If we drag somebody along smooth, loose sand, perhaps they would fare a little better than over and through ravines, creekbeds, stones, etc…
Best wishes,
hh
Not boulders, but rocks. They were dragged over all kinds of desert scrub and sagebrush, not smooth sand. Greg even had a worm-cam that let you see the sagebrush rushing up to scrape him.
When they showed Selleck being dragged, the implication was that he had first been badly beaten, and then dragged for maybe miles, so he was semi-conscious at best
although he was in good enough shape a couple minutes later to make sassy quips and then outdraw and kill three men at once in the climactic gunfight
but Greg went straight from the saddle to being dragged, and was apparently in full control of his body, and he seemed to be making a conscious effort to stay face down as he was being dragged, and even seemed to pull himself up on the rope so as to put all his weight on his junk. I imagine that I would do my best to roll over onto my back. Less stuff apt to get torn off that way.
James Byrd Jr. died from being dragged behind a pickup truck by 3 white men in Jasper, Texas in 1998. He was dragged for about 2 miles along a smooth asphalt paved road (no rocks, cactus, etc.). He was killed when he hit a metal culvert at the side of the road, which severed his head & right arm from his body. The later police investigation found identifiable parts of his body in about 6 dozen places along the road.
It appears that even if he had not hit that culvert, the damages done to him would have left him severely injured or dead, just in that 2 mile distance. Those scenes in movies were probably traveling slower than this, but over much roughter ground So it seems they should probably have shown more severe damage – a disabled or dead victim in reality. (But that wouldn’t work for the plot!)
IIRC, that stunt – which has been used in movies since the 1920s – involves the stunt man sitting on a sort of a sled, which has a cable going up his pants leg and attached to the stirrup. There is no stress on his leg, and the sled protects him from rocks and such.
Mythbusters tested this once in their western episode, and concluded that the way it’s shown in Western movies is (like a lot of other stuff in westerns) completly made up and unrealistic.
Yes, in real life you would most likely suffer serious injuries, up to fatally. Have you ever looked at how road rash from a motorbike accident without the heavy-duty leather protective gear, just jeans, looks like?Here’s a picture that the victim survived (PDF, page 32).
Several years ago, the ADAC tested different types of protective gear by dragging them over simulated concrete at the speed for typical heavy motorbike accidents (I think 80 km/h), and observing how much they wore through and how many minutes they lasted; for comparision and shock value, they took a piece of jeans, which was abraded to a big hole in seconds.
Granted, a horse doesn’t go 80 km/h … but it can go about 40 km/ h in full galopp. Doing this for more than 5 minutes means serious injuries.