Tag Archives: horse racing

Horses and Humans: The Unlikely Bond between Prey and Predator

Horse and rider jumping a hurdle
Photo by Gene Devine on Unsplash

Debbie says:

Horse-and-human teams perform complex manoeuvres in competitions of all sorts. Together, we can gallop up to obstacles standing 8 feet (2.4 metres) high, leave the ground, and fly blind – neither party able to see over the top until after the leap has been initiated. Adopting a flatter trajectory with greater speed, horse and human sail over broad jumps up to 27 feet (more than 8 metres) long. We run as one at speeds of 44 miles per hour (nearly 70 km/h), the fastest velocity any land mammal carrying a rider can achieve. …

That’s the opening of Janet Jones’ essay in Aeon, “Becoming a Centaur.” Jones has been a neuroscience professor and a stable owner, so she brings a beautifully doubled perspective to the topic, reminding me of Adam’s Task by Vicki Hearne, a 1986 book about training (mostly) horses and dogs from the perspective of a philosopher and poet who extensively studied animal training as well as doing it professionallly. But Hearne’s perspective was only secondarily scientific; Jones is steeped in numbers and fascinating explanations:

No one disputes the athleticism fuelling these triumphs, but few people comprehend the mutual cross-species interaction that is required to accomplish them. The average horse weighs 1,200 pounds (more than 540 kg), makes instantaneous movements, and can become hysterical in a heartbeat. Even the strongest human is unable to force a horse to do anything she doesn’t want to do.

Jones cannot get over her wonder that humans and horses aren’t enemies, and she describes quite lyrically how the connection works:

In mounted teams, horses, with prey brains, and humans, with predator brains, share largely invisible signals via mutual body language. These signals are received and transmitted through peripheral nerves leading to each party’s spinal cord. Upon arrival in each brain, they are interpreted, and a learned response is generated. It, too, is transmitted through the spinal cord and nerves. This collaborative neural action forms a feedback loop, allowing communication from brain to brain in real time. Such conversations allow horse and human to achieve their immediate goals in athletic performance and everyday life. In a very real sense, each species’ mind is extended beyond its own skin into the mind of another, with physical interaction becoming a kind of neural dance.

Jones provides a wealth of scientific detail–the differences between horse and human eyes, different communications with the brain cortexes, the art and science of subtle signals (inward pressure from a rider’s left calf tells the horse to move sidewise to the right). But the part that feels, well, miraculous, is the brain-to-brain communication:

Specifically, neural signals from the horse’s eyes carry the shape of an object to his brain. Those signals are transferred to the rider’s brain by a well-established route: equine receptor cells in the retina lead to equine detector cells in the visual cortex, which elicits an equine motor reaction that is then sensed by the rider’s human body. From there, the horse’s neural signals are transmitted up the rider’s spinal cord to the rider’s brain, and a perceptual communication loop is born. The rider’s brain can now respond neurally to something it is incapable of seeing, by borrowing the horse’s superior range of vision.

These brain-to-brain transfers are mutual, so the learning equine brain should also be able to borrow the rider’s vision, with its superior depth perception and focal acuity.

And if that weren’t enough, Jones goes on to speculate that humans may be able to transmit executive function (the ability to form expectations, make a plan, and carry out that plan) to horses, whose brains don’t operate on that level. This is unproven, but Jones gives some examples of why she believes that scientific study might find evidence.

I have effectively never been on the back of a horse, beyond a few childhood forays in those very controlled pony ride attractions. So I can only faintly comprehend the sensations Jones describes. If you’re a rider, I suspect this article will have an even stronger impact–meanwhile, I’m just going to spend some time revelling in the magic relationship between horses and humans–and the science driving the magic.

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It’s Horse Abuse, but We Call It “Sport”

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Debbie says:

The world is buzzing with the results of Saturday’s Kentucky Derby. Maximum Security, a horse that only became the favorite within a day or so before the Derby, was disqualified at the finish line for crossing outside of his lane and endangering other horses and jockeys. The decision is wildly controversial, with appeals flying, lawsuits threatened, and even 45th weighing in against the decision to disqualify. Sports books and betting sites are among the big winners: they stood to lose substantial amounts if the favorite won, and can rest easy paying out the few people who bet on Country House at 65:1 odds.

Why would I talk about this in Body Impolitic? Because I found Sally Jenkins’ piece for the Washington Post, “Forget Maximum Security’s Misstep: The Whole of Horse Racing Is a Foul.” Jenkins, by the way, believes the officials at the Derby finish line made the right call — once you accept all the premises she questions:

A foul? They called a foul because Maximum Security with Luis Saez aboard swerved out of his “lane”? “He’s a baby,” Saez said rightly of his horse. Where, pray tell, was the discernible lane in all that muck and rain and screaming and flogging and young animal surging? Where is the “lane” in a sport beset by medication overuse and purse structures that incentivize racing horses even when they are hurt, in which the jockeys whip-beat their horses to the finish on a clearly unsafe wet surface the substance of farina?

This isn’t a sport; it’s a fancied-up vice. Horse people counted on the excitement of the Derby to obscure the fact that 23 horses died at Santa Anita this winter, and Churchill Downs, too, is one of the deadliest tracks in America. All you could think, during the long 22 minutes that the stewards took to review the film, as the walkers led the steaming, mud-caked contestants in cool-down circles while great plumed exhalations came from their nostrils, was, “I don’t give a damn who won; somebody just please get these horses out of the mud, and check their legs, and dry their coats, and give them something to drink.”

For all the indignities and mistreatment foisted on human athletes, at least (most) humans have the chance to walk away, to say “This isn’t worth it.” A human held on the sidelines while the judges waffle can at least scream at the judges, and might even be able to throw up her hands and head for the locker room. But a horse is at the mercy of humans–and the humans (no surprise!) care more about who won than whether the horses are taken care of in the moment.

But why would we care for horses in the moment when we don’t care for them in the long term?

Some tracks hurt horses more than others, Churchill Downs is one of them, and everybody in this beautiful-turned-rotten game knows it.

As far as chance and luck go, Churchill Downs is just lucky it doesn’t have a horror on its hands. …  As veteran Louisville Courier-Journal journalist Tim Sullivan has pointed out, 43 thoroughbreds have died of race-related injuries at Churchill Downs since 2016, a rate of 2.42 per 1,000 starts, which is 50 percent higher than the national average. Yet not until two weeks ago, amid scrutiny of its track record in the wake of the Santa Anita debacle, did Churchill Downs move to institute any common-sense reforms. It will install an equine medical center and surveillance cameras in barns and advocate for medication reform. That’s a start.

Jenkins clearly loves horse racing, and loves horses. And she sounds like she’s coming to the conclusion that if she wants to continue loving horses, she has to stop loving horse racing.

We see this story everywhere we turn: the human children at the U.S./Mexico border, or drinking water in Flint, Michigan; the racing greyhounds; the hordes of near-starving feral cats domesticated and then abandoned in cities all over the world; the ever-growing number of extinct or near-extinct species.

I don’t know any way to talk about this without cliché, but this one, like so many clichés, is a truth that needs to be universally acknowledged. We are all connected; we rely on each other. To respect and value variety and comfort in human bodies is to respect and value variety and comfort in animal bodies. And to monetize and commoditize bodies is to demean us all.

The only Kentucky Derby result anyone should be happy about is that the horses made it safely back to the barns — this time.