Stories From the Saddle — Reflections on Racing, Riding and Living with Horses
Tomorrow, thousands of TVs will echo with the sounds of pounding hooves. Tomorrow, the gleaming coats of thoroughbreds will glisten in high definition as humans hungrily watch their heaving sides, urging them to greater efforts. Tomorrow whips will fall on tender flesh and blood will run from nostrils as hearts, bred too big, burst with effort. Tomorrow, someone will win and tomorrow, almost certainly, someone will die.
When I was a kid I used to love watching the Melbourne cup. With the day off school we used to spend it with friends or family, watching the race on TV and drawing names and numbers out of a hat for a friendly bet on the big race. I remember laughing over the horses funny race names, commenting on the jockeys bright coloured silks and picking our favourite horses as they were paraded around before the race began. Afterwards, my Mum and I began a tradition where we took our own horses for a ride around town to celebrate and show them our appreciation. I saw it as a day for horse lovers. A day to celebrate and appreciate what beautiful animals horses were and their incredible talents. Now, it makes me sick.
Like most animal activists, I see the Melbourne Cup as one of the most publicly acceptable and blatant examples of human’s exploitation of other animals. Even putting the massive death toll to one side, forcing horses to run at speeds that far exceed anything they would reach naturally unless their lives were in danger is undeniably wrong on so many levels. But the horrors of the racing industry don’t just stop on the track. Taking a peek behind the scenes, the bloody industry becomes even more horrific as the true reality of what goes into breeding and training race horses becomes apparent. The blatant commodification of horses is rampant in the industry, with hundreds of thousands of healthy horses being murdered every year simply because they’re not fast enough.
One of these horses is known by the name Patrick and he is cared for by my mother. Patrick was deemed unsuitable for racing and so he was sent to the knackery. He was five years old when he was sentenced to death. Horses can live up to 30 years of age. I’ve known Patrick for nearly 7 years and I can not even begin to describe the numerous physical and psychological issues he has had to deal with. Almost all of them can be directly linked back to his time spent racing and the training he was forced through as a young horse.
However, this is not just another article explaining why the Melbourne Cup, and horse racing in general is cruel, outdated and should be banned. While I agree with these points, this is a topic that goes far deeper than that. It goes right to the heart of how most humans see horses in general and, by extension, the nature of speciesism itself. Growing up around horses and exploiting them myself for most of my life, the way humans use and conceptualise horses is a topic that is close to my heart. In this post I hope to lay out some of the thoughts and realisations I have had as I’ve confronted the realities of my own internalised speciesism and that of those around me.
I want to begin by going back to the day when I first realised the extent of my complicity in the species based exploitation of horses. It was late 2016 and I would have been vegan for around 6 months. Although I had readily embraced a belief in the systemic exploitation of other species by humans and the morally unjustifiable nature of the use of animals for human gain, I still struggled to apply this to my relationship with horses. I had been riding since I was three years old and I counted horses I had spent time with as amongst my closest friends. I saw my relationships with them as mutually beneficial, trusting and loving and I fought many internal battles with myself imagining giving up riding.
On this particular day, my Mum and I had gone up to the paddock where our two horse friends Bud and Patrick live to take them out to eat grass, as they had eaten most of the grass in their paddock. I put a halter and lead on Bud, the horse I had been riding for 8 years, and took him outside where the grass was longer and greener. I stood with him for a while before remarking to my Mum how strange it was that he wasn’t eating any of the grass. Mum looked over and remarked nonchalantly that it was probably because I was there. “You trained him well,” she said before returning her attention to Patrick who was happily munching away.
Those words hit me like a physical blow, driving home the fact that I had been avoiding for many months. Despite my love for the horses I had ridden and cared for, despite my insistence that I respected them and despite the ‘bond’ I shared with them, my past was characterised not by a string of mutually beneficial and loving relationships with horses but a trail of broken hearts.
You may be wondering, why a horse not eating in my presence caused such a massive shift in my thinking? Well, the answer goes right to the centre of what is involved in the domestication of horses and what it takes to make them rideable. Horses are highly intelligent and incredibly sensitive animals whose relationships with humans stretches back centuries. Being swift, smart, strong and having a comfortable back, it is not surprising that humans looked at horses and saw an opportunity to exploit them. We are, after all, humans. But, while other domesticated animals such as dogs and cats, have largely had their desired characteristics bred into them through generations of selective breeding, a horses capacity to be ridden has never, and likely will never, come naturally. While many dogs are naturally friendly and loyal and require minimum training to learn how to interact with humans in the way they want them to, I am yet to meet a horse who will allow themselves to be ridden without an intensive training process, often referred to as ‘breaking in.’ I’m not saying that domesticated dogs and cats do not face oppression under humans but what I am saying is that, although horses are often placed in the same privileged domain as these animals, their exploitation is almost always far more intense and impactful than what happens to other animals treated as ‘pets.’
So, what does it take to break in a horse? While there are many different methods and techniques, the heart of it is the same as most other training of animals; to make the abnormal normal and to rewire an individual’s brain to respond unnaturally to environmental stimuli. In the case of most horses, this involves training them out of the instinct to respond with fear and aggression at the sensation of another animal sitting on their back, and conditioning them to respond not to their own brains or instincts but to signals communicated to them by a humans hands and legs. Essentially, it would be similar to conditioning a human to respond to someone pointing a gun to their head by walking forward and embracing the person holding the gun as, under natural conditions, an animal on their back would almost always indicate a threat. It may sound relatively harmless, after all, once the conditioned response has been changed horses aren’t being hurt by being ridden right? However, this line of thinking denies the intense psychological trauma associated with distorting such deeply seated responses. Even more so, the associated effect of decimating a horses autonomy and sense of self is undeniable and its extent impossible to fully comprehend. Although I have never ridden an unbroken horse, in my 15 years of riding I never once rode a horse that did not resist my commands or my presence on their back at at least one point. Often it would happen repeatedly until that horse resigned themselves to the reality that I could control them by causing them discomfort or sometimes even pain or by denying them the opportunity to act autonomously. This might involve refusing to let them eat when I want them to do something, deliberately separating them from their companions to make them more obedient or physically exhausting them if they are ‘playing up’ by forcing them to trot in circles or keep up a fast pace for a long distance.
Writing this I feel sick thinking of the resistance that every horse I have known has shown to being used by humans and the way ‘horse people’ are taught to ignore this. If you’re reading this in shock at my cruelty, I will shock you more by saying that, despite doing all the things I listed above to horses and more — including using crops, restrictive bridles, forcing horses into situations that terrified them, galloping down steep hills on unstable terrain and heavily kicking horses or pulling at their mouth when they wouldn’t do what I wanted — I was often criticised by teachers at Pony Club for being too soft and too kind to the horses I rode. The expectation in horse circles is complete domination and a horse is considered satisfactory only if their rider manages to completely control them and suppress their natural responses to unnatural situations such as show jumping or dressage. A horse who displays natural responses to being dominated e.g. rearing, bucking, biting, kicking or resisting is considered to be ‘playing up’ and the rider is often criticised for not being strict enough. If a horse continues to resist they are often sold or, in many cases, killed if they are declared unrideable and, therefore, worthless. While racing is horrible, the exploitation of horses is deeper and more insidious than many people realise and the true reality of many horses experiences is often rarely spoken of.
Despite how it may seem, this post is not an attack against horse-riders. In fact, many people I’ve met who ride horses are the very same people who provide love, homes and better lives to horses rescued from the racing industries or from other abusive situations. The people I met while riding horses were often the kindest, most compassionate and most genuine people I have ever met and I truly believe that I have witnessed authentic, loving relationships between horses and humans. While I doubt how authentic relationships built on such an unequal power dynamic can be, I have seen time and time again the enormous capacity horses have to forgive and trust, so I do believe that relationships of care and trust can exist between humans and horses, despite the fact that one party is experiencing systemic and individual oppression at the hands of the other. What this post does intend to do is challenge the idea that industries lie at the core of speciesism.
While the racing industry contributes to the exploitation of horses, it is not responsible for itself. Or, to put it more clearly, the racing industry doesn’t exist in a vacuum, it exists because of a story. Industries don’t cause speciesism, speciesism is a dominant narrative which has established the conditions for industries built on the assumption of human superiority. So, tomorrow while the nation stops for a race where the stakes for some are literally life or death, I hope that some people stop and think about the stories that they live their life by. Do they truly reflect your values?
