Of Love and Horses

May 25th, 2006 | Posted by PostmanE

To be honest, I can’t really get with the whole Barbaro thing.

For a few minutes yesterday, I had a few people convinced that his breeders had decided to shoot him, and I thought it was a pretty funny joke. Apparently, it was not, as people asked me how I could make jokes about life and death while the horse’s life hung in the balance.

Well, he is a horse. And this whole outpouring of support thing is pretty hypocritical.

Don’t believe me? Check out (registration required) this column by William C. Rhoden in the NY Times today about a day at Belmont when the cameras aren’t there to capture the injuries of celebrity horses. Yesterday, a horse named Lauren’s Charm almost finished its race, got to the final turn, and then had a heart attack. By the time his trainers and medics reached him, he was dead. And the crowd barely noticed.

There was no array of photographers at Belmont Park yesterday, no sobbing in the crowd as a badly injured superstar horse tried to stay erect on three legs. There was no national spotlight.Instead, there was death. In the seventh race at Belmont, a 4-year-old filly named Lauren’s Charm headed into the homestretch. As she began to fade in the mile-and-an-eighth race on the grass, her jockey, Fernando Jara, felt her struggling, pulled up and jumped off.

As the race concluded, Lauren’s Charm collapsed. No one, except those associated with the horse and two track veterinarians, seemed to notice.

But there was nothing beautiful or gracious or redeeming about the seventh race at Belmont. This was the underside of the business. The nuts-and-bolts part, where animals are expendable parts of a billion-dollar industry.

The gate to the fenced-in area was closed. I glanced back at Lauren’s Charm, lying on the ground. Just days ago, the cameras were trained on Pimlico, and a nation cried for Barbaro. I wonder what the nation would have thought about this.

One animal breaks an ankle on national television in a Triple Crown race and sets off a national outpouring of emotion. A 4-year-old collapses and dies in full view on a sunny afternoon and not many seem to notice. Or care.

Sorry for the long quote, but you get the idea. It’s incredibly interesting to me that one horse can hurt its ankle and the nation does this, while another can suffer a heart attack and even the crowd at the track that day struggles to notice.

Another representation and further extension of our celebrity-obsessed culture, a culture in which American Idol, a stupid talent show, is a billion-dollar business?

I won’t go that far. Barbaro is just a horse, after all.

(By the way, if you visit that Barbaro message board and look hard enough, you can find a message from yours truly. I couldn’t resist. I’m not the only one - Don Quixote and Bill Walton both left messages too. Hilarious.)