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One of the thoughtful contributions of the play is how it opens discussion about the interplay of sex, worship, passion, suffering, alienation, madness, religion, media trivializations, deadening work, and the stifling codes of professional conduct and training.  The horses as part of totem worship or as animistic revelation are never (or should never be) "boiled down" to just sexual perversion.  That is the move of someone who, from dullness or from ideological motive, wants to stop discussion of the play's ideas.  Alan Strang's fascination with horses hints of sexual association, to be sure, but there is no copulation with horses in the play.  At the start of Act Two, scene 22, Dysart says that Alan "embraces" a horse: "He showed me how he stands with it after [riding] in the night, one hand on its chest, one on its neck, like a frozen tango dancer, inhaling is cold sweet breath."  There is much more hint of sex in the conventional setting of nude boy and nude girl in Act 2, Scene 33, when Alan and Jill intend quite explicitly to have sex, but end up not being able to do so in the "Temple" of Alan's God, i.e., the horse stables.  If sex with a horse is what the play is all about, then surely we could have been treated to a clearer voicing of that intention in the play.   

Furthermore, the idea that Alan would defile or provoke his God by forcible copulation seems absurd, especially given Alan's derision of the idea of "Equitation: Bowler hats and jodhpurs. [...] To put a bowler hat on [the horse] is <i>filthy</i>" (Act One, scene 13). We aren't even given to know the gender of the horses, so one has to conclude that within the world of the play the question of Alan's copulating with one of them is unknowable or not of sufficient interest to explain what one would think are certain key anatomical possibilities.  Also, Dr. Dysart, in a long and revealingly important speech for him, refers to the boy wanting to become a "Centaur": "I sit looking at pages of centaurs trampling the soil of Argos--and outside my window he is trying to become one, in a Hampshire field!" (Act Two, scene 25).  That's the real point: Alan wants to be one with his god, not an unusual prescription in religious practice.  If Alan wants to be a Centaur, then having sex with a horse is an unlikely way to make that occur.  Much more plausible is the idea of melding horse and rider, something already mentioned in the play when Alan bridles himself in his bedroom (Act 1, scene 14), and when his mother, Dora, tells him that "when Christian cavalry first appeared in the new World, the pagans thought horse and rider was one person" (Act I, scene 7).