Two Broken Ankles
May 4th, 2008 by Vihar ShethPosted in Animal Cruelty, Society
William C. Rhoden begins his piece in this Sunday’s The New York Times by asking, “Why do we keep giving thoroughbred horse racing a pass? Is it the tradition? The millions upon millions invested in the betting?” I’m going to go with the millions upon millions.
For those of you paying attention to the annual series of barbaric horse races, yesterday’s Kentucky Derby further highlighted the idiocy of the “sport”. The horse that finished second had to be euthanized immediately after the race because it broke both of its first legs trying to slow down. Supporters of the “sport” claim instances like this are rare. This claim is as true as is it ignorance.
In the upper eschalon of racing horses surely only a very horses are so tragically injured that they must be put to sleep, you know, instead of trying rehabilitate them as they’ve made people millions of dollars. The ignorance in the aformentioned claim arises from the fact that thousands upon thousands of horses you never see on televison on race day are abused on a daily basis.
Rhoden professes, “The sport is at least as inhumane as greyhound racing and only a couple of steps removed from animal fighting.” While horses aren’t trained to kill each other, that these animals are stressed beyond their natural limits to do things only man wants them to do makes this statement true. Anything for a dollar.
The more philosophical issue at hand here is that fact that we are selectively compassionate. People only object to something when it behooves them. People rationalize the extreme stupidity of group behavior because they could get paid at the end of the day.
A tragic ending to a horse race is only as rare as a hungry movie star. If we only examine the extremes of society, we will find it difficult to find relative atrocities. The truth, on the other hand, is that race horses aren’t the only horses that exist, and movie stars aren’t the only people that exist. Horses all over the world that never make the national broadcasts are abused and killed every day, and people who never make the national broadcasts die of hunger every day. 100 to 1 odds on the long shot makes these truths easy to ignore and keep us from evolving as a society.
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