We used to have legal blood sports in Massachusetts: cock fights to the death, bear baiting (in which a chained bear was torn apart by relays of dogs), even dog fights to the death.
We've moved beyond that. Perhaps because psychology convinced folks that brutality to animals leads to brutality toward humans (Jeffrey Dahlmer started on animals, according to the FBI), perhaps because Darwin and his successors convinced us we are all animals, perhaps because greater knowledge about the inter-connectedness of the environment showed people that our survival depends on how we treat creatures around us, or perhaps for some other reason, we no longer allow these kinds of sports.
The death of Eight Belles on the Kentucky Derby racetrack today -- a healthy animal forced to run for no purpose other than entertainment to the point where she broke both her legs and was killed -- suggests an uncomfortable kinship between horse racing and these earlier practices now deemed barbaric and illegal. The motives of the owners here may have been different, and there are in general many wonderful things about horse racing in my opinion, but the purpose -- the use of animals for entertainment -- was similar, and the result was the same for the horse.
(As an interesting aside, the MSPCA, one of the first animal welfare organizations in the United States, was founded in 1868 after George Thorndike Angell, a Boston lawyer, read about a horse race in which two animals -- each bearing two riders over 40 miles of rough roads -- were raced to death. Of late, however, sadly, that worthy institution appears to have ceded pride of place in the local animal protection business to PETA.)
Maybe the time has come to conclude that the costs of horse racing outweigh the benefits, and close the books on this practice, just as we have done with cock fighting, bear baiting, dog fighting and, perhaps soon, dog racing.
