Humanity owes the horse an immeasurable debt. For centuries the horse has been our partner, has shaped our history and sacrificed itself for our defense, our causes, and our conquests. The Native American Comanches, master horsemen, created an empire on the power they conjured from their deep and unique connection with the horse. The horse was critical to their existence as it became to the white settlers of the western frontier who would never have prevented their own annihilation had they not adopted the native’s mounted war techniques. Yet modern society, which has long abandoned warring on horseback, still tolerates dangerous and violent exploitation of the horse. Indeed, taxpayers fund it. Despite the sacrifices these allies have made for our evolution, we continue to demand they forfeit their lives, but not for so noble a cause as our survival. Today horses die not in battle but for sport. Another Triple Crown season means another cache of young horses who will publicly risk their lives for profit and entertainment. Hence the life of the American racehorse, run to death by the hundreds every year, is cheapened and disrespected.
Horses are central to my personal history, and I am bedeviled by memories of my track life, my former self. Years ago, I was galloping racehorses and immersed wholly in the world of racing. I admit to this day as a rider I have pride in my past. Though now as I get older and think more broadly my sense of the wrongness of modern American racing expands to include the context of the historical and philosophical sacrifices horses have made for humans and how dismissed their enormous contributions generally are. Whether one’s love for the horse manifests in the act of dressing up for a day at the races or in recognizing and being honest about the reality of how brutal racing can be to horses it is critical to think of the animal itself and to consider the countless horses who have died and will die for the trivial activity of racing. For them my heart aches. For those who acknowledge that reality and still defend and endorse racing, I am bewildered by that degree of callousness. The human ego is the horse’s most vile predator.
The racing industry boasts an era of new tech and practices that it claims lead to fewer deaths which is like saying we are still stealing, we are just stealing a little less. Do we applaud for the killing of fewer horses? To evaluate racing from a position of realism can only lead to the obvious conclusion that it is time to evolve away from this sport that subjugates so many horses to a life of misery and untimely death. It is hopeful to imagine that racing can be done in partnership with the horse and without taking its life but all the intelligence and creativity in the world won’t achieve that.
A horse is washed after a training session on Thursday prior to the running of the 151st Kentucky Derby. Photograph: Grace Bradley/Getty Images Our technological gains as a society do not and cannot compensate for our shortcomings in empathy and decency. Should our society continue to tolerate a sport that routinely and violently kills horses, a creature who has been a solid friend across the ages, we only expose our backwardness. The racing industry’s willingness to sacrifice horses for money and prestige lays bare the fact that despite grandiose proclamations of advancement it is by nature primitive. To enter the starting gate in 2025 and die without finishing the race is no progress for the horse whose ancestors stepped onto a battlefield in 1800 and never saw the end of the fight. Modern day horse racing is simply bad medicine.
That night he dreamt of horses in a field on a high plain where the spring rains had brought up the grass and the wildflowers out of the ground and the flowers ran all blue and yellow far as the eye could see and in the dream he was among the horses running and in the dream he himself could run with the horses and they coursed the young mares and fillies over the plain where their rich bay and their rich chestnut colors shone in the sun and the young colts ran with their dams and trampled down the flowers in a haze of pollen that hung in the sun like powdered gold and they ran he and the horses out along the high mesas where the ground resounded under their running hooves and they flowed and changed and ran and their manes and tails blew off of them like spume and there was nothing else at all in that high world and they moved all of them in a resonance that was like a music among them and they were none of them afraid neither horse nor colt nor mare and they ran in that resonance which is the world itself and which cannot be spoken but only praised. Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses