Giddyup

If American Pharoah wins the Belmont Stakes today, he will become the first Triple Crown winner in 37 years.  And there you have the sum total of my knowledge of horse racing.

I’ve been to a racetrack twice in my life, once to a dog track in Phoenix when I was seven and another time to do a newspaper feature story.  The only thing that interested me was the backstretch where all the help lived; it didn’t look like the kind of place where you’d want to raise a family.  Then again, what’s good about a racetrack?

Spectators gamble too much, the help gets miserable pay and the horses are on the clock—if they don’t win, they get canned, or did before the equine slaughterhouses were closed.  I can’t see an upside in American Pharoah winning, other than for his owner.  Winning will just encourage the competition to find the next Pharoah or Affirmed, which means more horses raised to race and more also-rans let out to pasture, if not canned or dumped on people ill-prepared to care for them.

I’m old enough to remember the junk man plying the alley with his horse-drawn wagon (yes, as late as the 1950s).  I sometimes share bike trails with a horse or two; their riders are always nervous that I’ll dart in front of them or do so something else really stupid out of a secret desire to be hoofed to death.   I feel for horses because they live in a Malthusian world where the cost of food and board determines their fate.  I respect horses for their beauty and their power.  I simply can’t get excited about them running around a track so some guy can get rich.  It’s more animal cruelty than sport.