KnittyNorah
Über Member
- Location
- The Frozen North (of England)
Horses are unreliable...well the ones I bet on are.
On that subject, as someone with an understanding of horses, what's your view of horse racing in general? I would say show jumping, but it seems to avoid the controversy.
I'm a fan, but I did see a talk that claimed the horse was in survival mode, as it's programmed to assume anything on it's back is trying to eat it, and the race is to avoid being the weaker one in the herd that the predator is trying to catch.
I have mixed feelings about horseracing. There is no doubt that horses love to run. They are - I think - exceptionally beautiful when they run. Movement is part of them; they need to move. They run by instinct; they are the ultimate prey animal who have adapted over millennia to co-operate with mankind - originally the hunter! - in a whole host of ways - but not to be mere pets, and it is often when they are treated as a pet, that trouble can and does ensue.
Horses are not running from a person on their back AT ALL - you only have to watch any horse with a rider on its back to see that. They are totally accustomed to carrying a person on their back, and are attentive to the cues that person give them. If that cue is to run fast, then they are usually more than happy to obey, be they racehorse or riding school pony!
Horses are very good at disguising any physical issues once the adrenalin/endorphin is flowing - it's age-old self-preservation coming to the fore - only when the excitement is over will they show lameness etc - but even in the excitement and adrenalin of a race, a good jockey can often feel if something is 'not quite right' and that is when you will see the jockey pull the horse up in the middle of the race. Unfortunately the horse's system is so very good at this that it will often 'run through' a minor injury undetected, resulting in making the minor injury much, much worse … sometimes euthanasia-worse. Green screens on the racecourse and all that. HOWEVER what no-one tells you in the aftermath of the enquiry and the condemnation of 'cruel sports' and so on, is that this sort of thing can, and sometimes does, happen to horses in their own fields, minding their own business, being ridden with the utmost care by loving owners etc etc.
A bunch of doddery old horses in a field will have a run - you can almost hear their joints creaking when they set off! They are running in response to an instinct to flee which is usually buried but which sometimes emerges, who knows why … sometimes it is started off by - literally - a gust of wind blowing the tail of one of the horses between its legs. It makes you laugh to see it - and worry, because it only takes an awkward clod of turf or a badly-placed molehill, for one of these oldsters to twist or break something, or slip into barbed wire or a protruding branch or stake. You can't wrap them in cotton-wool … and a minute after it started the whirlwind ends and they stand there, sides heaving, heads hanging, easing their old joints and pretending it never happened!
HOWEVER that said I believe that racehorses are trained and raced far too young, and some of the physical attributes bred for - especially for success at a young age, which is where the MASSIVE money lies - can be (although aren't always) to the detriment of the wellbeing of the horse as it matures. In addition, the mental health of a long-term, fully-stabled horse is rarely the best, although there are many ways to mitigate this which are increasingly better understood and more widely accepted nowadays than they were until about 40 or so years ago, and most racing stables, at least in this country, are pretty on-the-ball about that sort of thing.
Certainly the racing industry isn't perfect - is any industry? - but on the whole the horse, and veterinary medicine in particular, would be much the poorer without it. From what I understand, too, much of the early impetus in both drug use/detection wrt human sports, and in human fertilisation studies, was carried along on the back of racing-industry-funded research into the two subjects of 'horse doping' and issues with infertility in top racehorses.
Anyway, that's far too much off-topic already, better take this to a private convo if you want to expand on it!
