So. Anyone else out there see similarities between horse racing and dog fighting? At its root, both the horses and the dogs bear the burden of our desire for entertainment. And when they give their lives in the process, it’s in the name of sport. While I know that I cannot draw a straight parallel between the Michael Vick case and Eight Belles’ death at the Kentucky Derby, they look like kissing cousins. In a cloying New York Times article today, noted author and horse breeder Jim Squires says:
Horses break their legs running across pastures with no one on their backs. Whether wild or domesticated, they race with one another and often try so hard they hurt themselves. They run through fences. They kick each other regularly, often breaking their own legs and those of others. They, too, have to be euthanized. Horses who never saw a racetrack in their lives founder regularly from mysterious causes and end up like Barbaro.
Ain’t that just a paddock full of pony tears. Dogs fight each other too, don’t mean that we should be building pits for it. Or that we should be racing young horses well before their bones are fully formed. Makes me think of an E.T.-era Drew Barrymore on coke. And Squires then asks:
…why can’t we can quit pushing horses into the gate on television and whipping them to make them run? If the trainer can’t train his horse to go in the gate and the gate workers can’t put it in there without force, scratch him. Usually there is a reason a horse does not want to go in there. And usually the horses that want to run don’t have to be whipped. Beating a horse during a race and having it break down under the rider and lose its life is no way to build public support and attract new owners to this sport.
With the practice of beating ingrained in this sport, is it easy to mill about in madras yet detain dog fighting do-rags? All too easy. Read another take on the tragic death of the filly and the brutality of horse racing, penned by the eversage Start Snitching.
I’m off to a bullfight with Hemingway and Almodovar. The bulls like dying this way, ensconced in art, roses & honor.
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Related Links:
NYT bit about death by jumping.
Eight Belles/Sean Bell