Comment on Kentucky Derby Stories

Every newspaper in the US will have a story about the Kentucky Derby today and then tomorrow. Regardless of whose leg gets broken, who wins, who has to be "put down" either today or weeks from now, or if the race is uneventful, it needs to be stopped. Abolished. I don’t care if everything goes swimmingly today, as that’s not the point.

I read a Huffington Post comment about the derby by Purple Girl who wrote:

Although an awesome race, a historical tradition. I am still one who is concerned that these young horses are pushed to their limits before they are physically capable of really handling it.
Granted more is being done to care for those who don’t cut the mustard. but often they have been broken down so early in life by merely the training they spend their lives in pain and discomfort.
I wish the TB racing commision would consider pushing the ages up for these horses- when they have reached a more physically mature age for such grueling work.
Arabians don’t even start training young horse until they are late into their 2nd year and then it’s ground work first – then saddle, walk, trot, canter. Often not seeing a show ring until they are well into their 3rd yr.
I love to stand at the fence when the horses run by- but I know how many Others have been unable to hold up to the intense training.

This is exactly the type of comment I don’t want to see. I do not think it is "an awesome race" and the fact that it is a tradition is no excuse for using horses to race. Horses have been used by humans, nonstop, since shortly after they were unfortunate enough to meet our acquaintance.

Yes, there are culls. And yes, making babies race their underdeveloped bodies is cruel. (And remember, horses, like Greyhounds, may love to run, but they don’t love to race. Just ask my defiant boy Charles who refused to race for The Man and was discarded, and if he wasn’t so gorgeous he would’ve been killed. Other animals are more easily "broken," a word which I don’t need to explain).

Purple Girl is not an animal rights advocate, or at least I hope she isn’t as her strategy is primed for backfiring. We should wait to race them. We shouldn’t push them too hard. But watching them race is "awesome." We must find a way to use them a bit differently so we can still get what we want from them (notice how I don’t say what we "need," as we don’t need anything from them) without so many of their bodies breaking. Fewer broken bodies would be better.

The way to fewer broken bodies is clear and waiting for us to choose it. Stop breeding horses. Stop killing ("culling") horses. Stop racing horses.

I love to stand at the fence of my local horse sanctuary and watch the horses run by, if they are so inclined. And I love to see them stop when they feel like stopping.

Go online to your favorite publications and comment. Write letters to newspapers. The derby is once a year, and there will be people writing about cruelty and killing (they’ll say "culling") and changing the surface or the training schedule or whatever. But there won’t be as many people saying that we have no right to create horses and make them race. This "tradition" is nothing to be in awe of. It’s domination and enslavement for profit, period.