They Shoot Horses

From the ones I’ve seen, it was a long standing Western convention that horses didn’t get shot. Many a gunslinger killed a mounted man at more than a hundred yards using a six-shooter. The horses never seemed to be in danger.

Not long ago I watched one of the first spaghetti westerns, “A Fistful of Dollars”. There is a scene where one set of bad guys opens fire on a whole Mexican cavalry unit with a Gattling gun. After firing hundreds of bullets, a couple dozen men are dead, but the horses are hardly bothered. Now this could just be because of low budget filmmaking—it is easier to tell an actor to fall off a horse than to train a horse to fall down. But since spaghetti westerns overturn many Hollywood expectations, I take it to be a jab at convention.

In our movie, two horses get shot out from under their riders. First, Ned Pepper’s horse is killed by “La Beef”. Cogburn makes fun of him for shooting the horse and not the man. Second, in the big gun battle at the end, Cogburn is never hit with a bullet, but Ned Pepper shoots his horse out from under him. So instead of the traditional scene with the hero wounded on the ground with the bad guy closing in, we have the hero stuck under his dead horse with the bad guy closing in. Deliberate parody?