Reignman

My name is Reignman and I don’t understand what’s happening to me. I’m only five years old, not yet fully grown, but they say I’m already ‘retired’. I’m glad I don’t have to be ridden like I was, but it looks like they’ve got more they want to take from me now. 

It’s been 10 months since I left training. I had too many injuries they said, and they were right. Every one of those injuries had hurt, but they kept trying to put me back together and back on racecourses. Until, eventually, they stopped. Usually when they stop trying with horses like me we leave the yard and nobody knows where we’re going – but we don’t come back. But they kept me around for some reason. Today I’m finding out what that reason is. 

It’s National Racehorse Week, and it turns out I have more work to do. I’m to be an advertising prop for the industry that took me from my mother and used my childhood for profit. I’ve been driven by van to a shopping centre. I’m surrounded by strangers, all of them reaching for me, grabbing me, touching me. My hay bag is hung on the railing where they’re all gathered, I can’t eat unless I submit myself to their groping hands. 

I suppose I should be grateful that I’ve not had to endure worse in the name of ‘National Racehorse Week’. On the same day I was being used as a promotional tool in Liverpool, a filly has died racing in the ‘Celebrating National Racehorse Week Novice’s Hurdle’ at Newton Abbot. Her name was Lundy View and she was just four years old – younger than me and her life already over because she was forced to race. 

What I long for is an open space, a herd in which to find comfort and safety, and the opportunity to run not because someone demands it of me but because I want to feel the wind in my mane. Horses like me almost never get that, but we all deserve it. 

My name is Reignman. I am someone.