The Darley Arabian

My name is The Darley Arabian. It’s a strange name, isn’t it? It’s a strange life I’ve lived too. And a sad legacy I leave behind. Was born in Syria and found in Aleppo by the man who would buy me – paid for with a shipment of rifles – and seal the fates of my children and theirs. I was only 4 years old, barely an adult by a horse’s standards, but I was big, much bigger than the horses they had back in England, they said. 

Before long I was on a ship to that strange land where I would father children who would have their lives taken for racing. Being on the sea is an unsettling experience for a horse. The journey seemed to take forever and then I found myself in a new and unfamiliar world. A horse’s life in the Middle East is a different one; the landscape is different, the air feels different and the ground is different under your hooves. They said this strange new place was my home, but it didn’t feel like home. 

My job wasn’t really to race, but to create horse racing as it exists in your time. The brother of the man who bought me put me to work breeding with his mares. I didn’t know it, but it was my children and their children who would give their lives to racing. My son, Bulle Rock, was the first ‘Thoroughbred’ to be exported to America. My grandson, Eclipse, was considered the greatest racehorse of his time, leading to him being used to produce yet more children for racing. 

Many of my children went on to have the modern world of horse racing built upon their backs. In that world when a horse runs, when they fall, and when they die on a track, in training, or in a paddock, there’s a 95% chance that horse is one of my descendants. This is not the life I would have chosen for them, if choice were something horses like me were allowed. 

My name was The Darley Arabian. I was someone.