 Hesther Salomon, a magistrate, asks her platonic friend Martin Dysart, a disillusioned psychiatrist who works with disturbed teenagers at a hospital in Hampshire, England, to treat a 17-year-old stable boy named Alan Strang after he blinded six horses with a sickle.With Alan only singing TV commercial jingles, Martin goes to see the boy's parents, the non-religious Frank Strang and his Christian fundamentalist wife Dora.She had taught her son the basics of sex and that God sees all, but the withdrawn Alan replaced his mother's deity with a god he called Equus, incarnated in horses.