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E, DanielWhen I look at a horse, the last thing on earth that occurs to me is that it is an animal that wishes to be fenced in to prevent its escape.
I don't look at the swail in its back and say 'gee, that animal is dying to have 150-200 pounds propped on its spine as it moves around. The animal wasn't 'designed' that way - either naturally or supernaturally - to carry weight as it bounced around, any more than a tiger's back is a proper location for my ass either. No other creature 'rides' a horse, and if you have to break one's spirit to allow such conveyance, that should tell you everything you need to know about the activity.
While you can create relationships with horses if that is all they ever know, it is not an animal that would choose to seek out our companionship if it had its druthers, this is no dog, no ferret. It doesn't share in our lives and lifestyles, it merely acquiesces if properly trained to allow us to meet on neutral ground and provide an experience humans were not originally ever going to have.
So it feels good to us, and we therefore bend the natural world to fit our piques. And then we make up whatever excuse we wish to explain it to ourselves, even when deep down we know its wrong.
And please, don't any horse racing expert or lover try and tell me that MAKING an animal run to it's very limits under the pump of a rider is noble, or normal, or anything other than it really is. The immature dalliances of our species that has worked out how to rule every thing in our domain and have little to no understanding or empathy for the creatures we co-exist with.
Yeh, Sport of Kings exactly. Takes exactly that kind of arrogance to justify it.
No PETA member, vegetarian or Oregonian, though that says more about my own lack of 'stuff' than the failings of these headings.
Daniel