Beating a dead gift horse in the mouth

[captcalhoun]

my mate's into beastiality, necrophilia and S&M.

personally, i think he's flogging a dead horse...

 

[Capn Flukie]

Whoa, Nellie!

 

[MetalPants]

Well I suppose by "beating" he could mean striking them on the head as opposed to beating their bodies over and over which was what I was imagining when I asked the question. Horses have, relatively speaking, soft skulls and and are more vulnurable to head trama than some animals.

I believe that's the way most butchers kill the animals-knock it in the head to kill it, and then whatever method used to bleed and gut the carcass. That is of course if you are doing this by hand. Modern machinery is so much faster at the fleshing and eviscerating.

 

[M'Sharak]

The gift horse one, it comes from back in the day. You could tell the health of a horse by checking it's gums. Basically it was saying that if you are getting a horse as a gift, you don't embarrass the person giving the gift by checking the gums.

It wasn't the health you'd be checking by looking a horse in the mouth, so much as its age. A dishonest seller might try to represent it as a much younger (and thus more valuable) animal, but the teeth were like an odometer which couldn't be rolled back, giving a pretty accurate indication of the horse's total mileage.

 

[Capn Flukie]

^ it's where the saying 'long in the tooth' also comes from.

 

[M'Sharak]

^ it's where the saying 'long in the tooth' also comes from.

Bingo.

 

[Asbo Zaprudder]

A stitch in time saves nine, but act in haste and repent at leisure.

"Right now I need aphorisms like I need holes in my heads." Zaphod Beeblebrox

 

[Zulu Romeo]

A stitch in time saves nine, but act in haste and repent at leisure.

You should look before you leap. But then again, he who hesitates is lost.