equicidal

comparative more equicidal · superlative most equicidal

1. rareOf or pertaining to equicide.

   It’s just that extremely few trainers and riders will consider it anything less than equicidal.

   1994, Tom Ivers, The Fit Racehorse II, →ISBN, page 278

   5 more examples

   The equicidal bull was finished in due course like his fellows, and at length but one remained, a brave, tough youngster that played the game vigorously, but yet without great malice, and to lamentably futile purpose.

   1934, The Catholic World, page 197, column 1

   This equicidal virus, which causes equine and human outbreaks, also has clinical characteristics which distinguish it from the sylvatic type.

   1976, Animal Health: Programs and Trends in the Americas, 1976, page 81, column 1

   In his enormously affecting play Equus, Peter Shaffer uses horses as a Christ symbol and the “sharp chains” in the horses’ mouths as a metaphor for Christ’s agonies. Much of the dramatic impact of the play is projected by Shaffer’s psychiatrist-protagonist who is tormented by the feeling that, by relieving the equicidal obsession of his seriously disturbed adolescent patient, he is destroying the boy’s deepest passions, his capacity “to worship,” as the psychiatrist puts it.

   1981, Bennett M. Berger, “Appendix: Ethnographic Methods”, in The Survival of a Counterculture: Ideological Work and Everyday Life Among Rural Communards, University of California Press, page 223

   Macbeth: I wish your horses swift and sure of foot, / And so do I commend you to their backs. / Farewell. (I think I’ll kill their horses, too.) /[…]I was not at all bothered by Macbeth’s interruption in the middle of his second speech, Banquo’s long comment on his short last speech, or the equicidal joke that concludes the scene.

   1998, English Journal, page 99

   You could point at the high incidence of Renaissance paintings, plaster saints, zucchini, frescoes, nuns, tricolor pasta, Day-Glo cyclists, olive trees, leaning towers, old women, equicidal horse races, two-lane motorways, bridges, dogs, geranium mini-gardens, Madonnas and Davids, baptisteries, and tiramisu ice cream—and much of this would be true.

   2002, John Walsh, “Stolen Beauty”, in James O’Reilly, Tara Austen Weaver, editors, Tuscany: True Stories, San Francisco, Calif.: Travelers’ Tales, →ISBN, page 191