Shergar

My name is Shergar and I don’t know where they’re taking me. I’m used to being put into trailers and vans, but this time it’s different. The humans are shouting at each other, and I don’t recognise these ones with their faces covered. 

The last few years have been particularly confusing for me. I’m not even 5 years old yet but there is a lot of weight on my shoulders. I won my last race at Ascot on the 25th July 1981 – I was only 3 years old, and by the end of that year my ‘career’ was over. I was too fast, too famous, and too valuable to be exposed to the risks of racing anymore. I had also broken my winning streak by coming fourth, so nobody could risk me losing any more value by not coming first again. I was to be a stallion at stud instead. 

The next year I was made to mate with 44 females I would never see again, so that those who owned me could charge a fee. All I had known was life in racing, and now all I would know is a life of sexual exploitation. But that too was cut short when the men in masks came. 

They took me from the stud farm with violence, and violence would be the way I died. It would not be the same kind of violence that kills others like me; not the whips and the beatings that send so many to their deaths. The irony of my death was to be that I would be killed, not for no longer being valuable, but for having too high a price on my head. 

There are some people who are allowed to kill us, and some people who are not. The men who took me were considered criminals because in taking me and killing me they cost my owners money. But if, like so many others, I had fallen while racing my masters would have had every right to kill me on the course. They would say ‘it’s just part of the sport’. 

My story would fascinate people for years to come – the horse who disappeared and was never found again – but my story is no different to so many who don’t survive racing. For thousands it ends with a gun and a broken body discarded like waste. For most, nobody will ever know their names. 

My name was Shergar. I was someone.