Horses are not like people, Vol. 84

May 5th, 2008 | Posted by PostmanE

I’ll be honest. I don’t know nearly enough about horseracing to create any sort of coherent argument against the sport at large. Like most other sports — and pretty much anything, I guess — I assume horseracing is filled both with people who do the right thing and with people who don’t, people willing to win at any costs and people who maintain a stricter code of ethics. I couldn’t argue otherwise.

But it does seem a little weird to me to somehow applaud the notion of a horse dying on the racetrack, as if that horse’s death is a sign of its courage. That’s how New York Times contributor Jane Smiley ended this informative column yesterday, and I have to admit I’m a little confused:

It is possible, though, that Eight Belles would have run herself to death on any surface. We all know people who cannot admit defeat, and horses can be the same. We all know people who simply defy their own weaknesses and go on. I see Eight Belles’s death as heroic in that sense — stubborn and foolish, shocking and tragic, but not, in the end, an accident. I think the filly’s courage deserves respect, not pity.

I’m not really sure why any horse’s death would deserve “respect.” Sadness, yes, but if courage is defined the decision to do something contrary to one’s benefit for the fulfillment of a higher purpose (a totally arbitrary definition I just made up), then it’s hard to see how the horse “chose” to run itself literally to death, or what higher purpose — beyond human entertainment — it was serving. That’s not really courage. More likely, the horse was listening to its breeding and training when it unconciously said to itself, “There’s this dude on my back hitting me really hard with this stick. That means I need to run faster.” And then it kept running. So how is that courageous, again?

More likely, Ms. Smiley — like a legion of Barbaro fans before her — is more concerned with assigning human characteristics to an inhuman animal than she is with admitting that sometimes, horseracing is completely, utterly senseless. Most of all to the horses.