On Racehorses and Ignorant Neighbors

Jane Shakman’s Letter to the Editor under "The Welfare of Horses" in today’s New York Times is about welfare rather than abolition, however its other points are worth recognition:

• "But let us also give thought to the thousands of horses that are bred every year for racing and don’t make the cut or outlive their usefulness to the investors and owners." Ah, if she only wrote "who" are bred I would have been more thrilled. Then again, the editor would likely have "corrected" her.
• "Most wind up auctioned off for a few dollars each and sent to the foreign slaughterhouses to be made into pet food or dinner for someone overseas. Even the 1986 Kentucky Derby winner Ferdinand ended up in a Japanese slaughterhouse because he wasn’t proving his monetary value as a stud."
• "It’s not just the injured horses that suffer. It’s the thousands of faceless colts and fillies we never see that suffer from this so-called sport."

Most Americans are ignorant about the process that creates a horse, and then what happens after the horse no longer wins. When I let my thoughts about the Derby known to a neighbor who invited me to his Kentucky Derby party (few people in my community know I’m a vegan, and the others don’t even know what it means), he told me that "those horses live better than we do," and that of course they love racing.

Now, this is a 60-year old man who has a green grill shaped like an alligator, that is longer than a pick-up truck (and is in fact hitched to one). Every weekend he shovels coal into it and, in his driveway, he grills hundreds of pounds of nonhuman animal flesh, and I have to close my windows so I don’t spend the day with the stench of charred corpses. (I live 100 yards away and it feels like the grill is in my living room.) I’m not sure what he does with all of the meat, but I do know he isn’t supposed to be doing it according to our association rules (he’s not even allowed to have the 8-foot high, 15-foot long grill-gator shaped or not), but he’s in law enforcement and therefore apparently above all kinds of laws.

I tell you this because this man is the last person who would ever understand veganism. He still goes to the track to watch Greyhound racing, and whenever he sees me he asks about the racing careers of my dogs. And every time I tell him that none of that matters to me, that they have to be rescued for a reason, and that I don’t think we have any right to breed them and race them. It’s like Groundhog Day whenever I see him. He doesn’t hear a word I say, and it’s not as if I’d ever make an impact anyway, so my attempts are admittedly half-hearted.

I was particularly annoyed with this man as I walked past his house on Saturday, complete with a huge Kentucky Derby flag (another thing we’re not permitted to have). I said that perhaps if he knew everything involved in horse racing, he might not find it worthy of a party, and he promptly demonstrated that he knew nothing and was in fact gravely misinformed. I told him I didn’t believe we had the right to create and use horses, at which point he looked at me with a blank face. I had no desire to talk to him and was late for an event already, and said: Look, I don’t want to hurt anybody if I don’t have to. I don’t want to kill anybody if I don’t have to, I don’t want to eat anybody if I don’t have to, and I don’t want to bring anybody into this world just so I can try to make a buck off of them. Enjoy your party.

I walked about twenty yard then turned toward my house, and out of the corner of my eye I could see he was still standing, motionless, staring at me. Within two hours, Eight Belles was dead.

When I walked by the grill-master’s house yesterday with the dogs, he very sheepishly said hello, and said nothing about Greyhound racing or horse racing.