Horse Sense?
Kind of an odd juxtaposition this weekend. Being one of Earl’s friends, I heard about the lengthy but ultimately successful labor of Hannah, a mare that he and his wife own. (Pictures over at Earl’s blog.)
Being a Philadelphian, I also heard a lot of hype about the Preakness and Barbaro, and then the accident that left one of the horse’s legs fractured in a life-threatening way. (Looks like surgery to repair the leg was successful, but I’m counting no chickens.)
And there’s a part of me that really wonders about the whole horce-racing thing. When a boxer or a football player puts himself at risk of death, paralysis, or debilitating injury, we can at least say it was his choice. You can’t really say that with a horse, and trying to call a horse an “athlete” doesn’t really change that fact. These are creatures being bred for the purpose of being forced into a dangerous situation for the sake of human beings’ entertainment. Something about that is just not sitting right with me right now.
About Dave Thomer
Born and raised in Philadelphia. Studied philosophy at Fordham University in the Bronx, where I made many great friends and met my wonderful wife. We moved back to Philadelphia, where I studied philosophy some more and became a teacher. Online and off, I'm looking for ways that we can be better citizens and build stronger communities.
Monday, May 22nd 2006 at 11:44 pm |
First off congrats to Earl and his beautiful colt. When I was in vet school I did my share of foal watches (why can’t they just give birth in the day time?).
But Dave has a good point, and it is a very hard question to answer.
From a evolutionary standpoint, the Horse family is actually on the decline, and of left to their own would probably go extinct. I’m sure they won’t while humans are around, since we love them too much.
And speaking from a medical standpoint, horses are a disaster waiting to happen. Any horse owner who has gone through a (expensive) colic surgery knows that.
One could also make an ethical argument. But I will say that most high performace horses love what they do. This is their purpose in life, and they love doing it. We have been breeding horses for a very long time, and sometimes it goes right, and sometimes it goes wrong (such as breeding a paint with a paint).
I do understand the ethics of the issue and I am torn. I know that we are breeding these animals to do potentially dangerous activites, and that the breeding itself can lead to potentially dangerous conditions. But I also understand, for lack of a better term, the “mystique” around horses, and the joy they bring to many people’s lives, as they did for me as I was trying to get into vet school. So I really do not know the right answer for the question, if there even is a right answer.
But I will fix the horse if there is a problem, or at least refer you to a horse vet since I only work on dogs and cats 🙂
Tuesday, May 23rd 2006 at 12:24 am |
Here’s where I expose my near-complete ignorance of all things equine:
How much do they enjoy all the things they have to do when they’re not running/jumping/whatever? Being trained, domesticated, disciplined, what have you?
Tuesday, May 23rd 2006 at 6:35 am |
That is a whole other can of worms right there.
This is my personal view on the matter. If the horses are suitably large piece of pasture land, then they can do quite well, most horses are content to sit around the pasture when not being worked.
If they are cooped up in a stall all day, then you can start to see behavioral problems, such a stall kicking, cribbiing, excessive scratching, etc, that arise from being is a small box all day with no way to release pent up energy.
Tuesday, May 23rd 2006 at 10:51 am |
A few years ago, our family farm did a couple of years worth of racehorse rescue – i.e. retired and/or very lightly injured race horses who have left the track for the last time and are looking for new owners. I have nothing but sincere admiration for folks who can do racehorse rescue full-time, but there’s a reason we don’t do it anymore – these horses fresh off the track have been pumped so full of steroids for so long that they can take weeks or months to detox. We’re talking about an amount of “performance-enhancing” drugs that would have Congressional hearings going on in a cold second were the athletes human. Some of these horses are so hopped up that they’d just as soon kill you as let you get far enough into a stall to feed them and care for them. I know enough pasture mares, geldings, and other horses to know that this just isn’t often a state you can get a horse into without provocation. Sure, there are horses that are easily spooked – I once took a kick to the kneecap from a quarterhorse who didn’t know what to expect from me and didn’t know what was expected of her – but unless you’re invading their space or otherwise interfering with them, they tend to keep a wary distance or leave you alone. The upshot of all this being, when the steroids alter their personalities that much, I can’t see the sport being good for them, and at the risk of anthropomorphizing, I sure can’t see them enjoying it. We do still have a couple of race track retirees at the farm. One of them, who towers over me by at least a foot and a half, now meekly comes up and waits for me to stick out a bare hand so he can lick it (he likes the salt from my sweat better than his mineral block). I figure that, when all is said and done, that’s the real horse right there finally shining through. He runs around in his quite sizable pen with his buddy (another former racer), but he also happily sits around, grazes, and seems to do the “Am I bugging you? I’m not touching you. Am I bugging you?” thing with any mares who pass by.
I’m amazed that Barbaro has pulled through so far. When you’re talking about a shattered pastern bone, you’re usually talking “euthanized on the track.” If he makes it, I’d guesstimate that his owners stand to recoup the money spent on saving him within only two or three breedings, and more power to them. You want to know what the average stallion would rather do anyway when given the choice? It ain’t runnin’ around in circles. Hey, more power to them too!
Tuesday, May 23rd 2006 at 1:11 pm |
The papers up here keep covering this, and one of the columnists today wrote that at one track – one track! – there have been an average of 26 catastrophic accidents a year, accidents where the horses were euthanized within 24 hours or so. Good grief.
And the stud value may be one of the main reasons Barbaro did get a chance to survive.
The more I read about this the more I feel myself being pushed into agreeing with the extreme position – the sport as a whole is morally indefensible as currently practiced.
Tuesday, May 23rd 2006 at 6:30 pm |
Money is ALWAYS a factor in these choices. If they can get the horse well enough to naturaly breed (artifical insemination is not allowed in thoroughbreds), and it can make the owners money enough to re-coop the cost of surgery, assuming it can be fixed, they will. If stallion won’t ,well then……