Genealogy

My name is Genealogy, and today feels different. I’ve done a couple of years racing now, but I’m only 4 years old. Every time I feel like I know what it is to be used for racing, they change it. They ask more from me, take me somewhere different, or they knock me out and I wake up weak, in pain, and surgically modified. They treat me like a machine that they can tear parts out to improve its performance. But every time they modify me, I feel it. 

Just a few months ago my latest surgery was on my throat. Something was happening during races that was making my throat want to close. It happens to a lot of horses when we’re pushed too hard. It was making me want to stop running. But horses like me don’t get the choice to stop running. Instead, the people who use us will have us operated on instead to make sure our airways stay open. 

That surgery was in June, and they had me racing again in July. Now it’s August and I’m at a completely new racecourse, with a completely new man on my back. It’s been dry recently and the ground feels strange. My throat feels strange. This place feels strange and the man on my back is strange. Not long into the race I lose my footing going over a hurdle. I don’t go down, but I can’t go on – the pain shooting up my leg is unbearable. To my surprise, unlike all the times the air burned in my throat, but they pushed me on, today they let me stop. 

It’s strange that of the surgeries that they invent for horses so many are bizarre interventions to get us to run faster, but so few are to let us survive the injuries we get whilst racing. We hear people say we’ll never get back to ‘racing standard’, or someone decides it’s ‘kinder’ to kill us. Who’s going to spend another 16 years or more looking after a horse like me who’s too injured to make money for them by racing?  

The day I was killed I was only four years old, still a child, and with every day of my life stolen in service of an industry that treated me like machinery.  

My name was Genealogy. I was someone.