Consider the Horses

Photo by Benigno Hoyuela on Unsplash

If you wander down to London’s Waterloo Station at this time of year, you might come across posses of people milling around the concourse awaiting the next train to Ascot. With their mid-week black tie and freakish headgear, they’re easily mistaken for punters in fancy dress off to some harmless summer fête, or a music festival for posh people.

Unless you consider the horses.

Royal Ascot is marketed as a great British tradition, a reputation solidified by its elaborate rules and rituals, and its monarchic origins. But like all traditions, it’s invented. And like so many celebrations of British pomp and pompousness, it’s a modern institution.

According to the novelist Jane Smiley, the rise of horse racing in the early nineteenth century is tied up with the emergence of capitalism and the novel–

a mutually nurturing threesome […] Each of the three is a form of speculation. Each of the three is a complex endeavour that does not easily give up its secrets (and maybe there are no secrets; maybe every success or failure is pure chance). Each of the three is a microcosm of existence – a brief and intense series of lost or gained fortunes and thrilling or terrifying plot twists. And without capitalism to systematise betting, without capitalism to systematise the distribution of printed narratives, we would not have the literary world or the racing world we have today.

Excusing as poetic licence Smiley’s quaint suggestion that capitalism has survived and thrived for two centuries by “pure chance”, it’s useful to be reminded that horse racing is, at root, an economic activity, a multi-billion-pound transnational industry, a gambler’s game. Not so far from casino capitalism after all.

Smiley’s horse-racing novels – whether by Trollope or Zola, Conan Doyle or Dick Francis – aren’t really about horses at all. They focus instead on the seedy side of owning and betting on thoroughbreds, activities that typically bring their human heroes to ruin. The horses and their activities are metaphors or backdrops for people’s emotions, dramas and relationships–romantic, familial and social.

There’s a parallel tradition of writing in which horses feature as protagonists. The most famous of this genre is probably Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty. Though today marketed as children’s fiction and widely considered a sentimental example of anthropomorphism, the Victorian novel was originally written for adults and published at an important moment for the animal welfare movement in England. Sewell, a Quaker, was part of a community of animal welfare pioneers (almost one hundred years after Black Beauty’s appearance of in 1877, another Quaker woman, Ruth Harrison, published the landmark critique of factory farming, Animal Machines).

Black Beauty has been celebrated as helping to generate public awareness of the abuses suffered by working horses in late nineteenth-century England. Horses have of course long been replaced on roads and in fields by cars and tractors, and today’s animal rights activists have shifted their attention to the treatment of racing horses. In April, protesters from the group Animal Rising disrupted the Grand National, another signature horse race in England. After climbing barriers to access the track, activists managed to delay the start of the race. Dozens were arrested and charged with causing public nuisance and criminal damage.

Three horses died during this year’s Grand National.

While jockeys, trainers and fans accused protesters of misunderstanding their sport, even of making matters worse for the horses by delaying the race, the RSPCA called for an urgent investigation into the deaths. Moreover, the extensive mainstream media coverage of the protests suggested increased awareness of and concern about the conditions of horses used in racing. According to Animal Aid's Race Horse Deathwatch website, which has been recording horse deaths at British races since 2007, 89 horses have died on the tracks this year.

While the liberal-left Guardian is probably not the broadsheet of choice for most racing aficionados, the paper’s racing coverage reflects these shifts. Ten years after publishing Smiley’s celebration of horse-racing in fiction in the run-up to the Grand National, this year the paper published an opinion piece by Animal Rising activist Alex Lockwood, explaining the group’s actions and putting them in the wider context of the contradictions of a nation that professes to love animals yet treats many of them as objects, for either entertainment or food.

Twenty years ago, the late David Foster Wallace attended another animal-focused seasonal event heralded as a great tradition: the annual Maine Lobster Festival. Wallace’s brief was to cover the festival for readers of Gourmet magazine. But after a few days wandering around the “mid-level county fair with a culinary hook” – the central feature of which is the World’s Largest Lobster Cooker, which can cook 100 creatures at a time – Wallace begins to wonder what the whole affair might feel like from the perspective of the lobster. Conceding that his foodie readership would probably rather avoid the question, Foster tackles it head-on: “Is it alright to boil a sentient creature alive just for our gustatory pleasure?”

In its endeavour to answer this question, Consider the Lobster reviews a range of scientific evidence and local views on the matter. In the end, the author confesses that he’s left in a state of confusion over the issue of eating animals. Nevertheless, Wallace asks readers to take some interest in what happens when a large crustacean is thrown into a pot of boiling water. His conclusion is that it’s pretty hard to deny that the animal is feeling something akin to pain. And that the lobster would probably prefer not to be boiled.

Now, no horse-racing fan is likely to claim that horses don’t feel pain. But by now it would be hard for them not to know that dozens of horses are seriously injured or die every year at professional races. Yet they continue to defend and attend the races, all for the price of a ticket, some champagne and a fancy hat.

The Animal Rising protesters, in contrast, demand that we look at these events from a different perspective. That we shift our attention away from the celebration of human-made traditions and the desire for a fun day out in the sun. That we think about the wider costs of horse racing.

That we consider the horses.

Pen in Fist, a newsletter on writing and activism, is written by me, C Lou, aka Dr Carrie. For information on my other writing and projects click here. If you haven’t already, you can subscribe to this newsletter for free here.