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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]
I eat animals and use their fur, wool and skin to clothe myself, so I can't point fingers.

[b]Also, I remember what Secretariat's owner always pointed out - that this was a horse who WANTED to run. [/b]He was good at it, he knew it, and that's what he liked to do.

The problem is interacting closely with other species when we cannot always know what they want, and how they feel. Homo Sapiens has domesticated animals for millenia, and most of these breeds would not survive in the wild now.

How can we treat them with respect, and stimulate them mentally with the activities they are good at and want to do? It's not enough to give them food and shelter.

As an animal biologist, I've always wondered about this.

[/quote]

I think this was a specious argument (by Penny Chenery). Secretariat was the result of centuries of breeding with the sole intent of creating a horse with not only the conformation and lung capacity to run, but also the desire to run and compete. He didn’t just pop up out of the plains. It’s like saying, “Well, Holsteins produce so much milk that we have to use them as dairy cows”. Well, duh. That’s the way we made them. 
[/quote]

I think it’s a complicated half truth, for sure. It is true that any horse will be perfectly content living in a field, anyone who says otherwise is lying. But it’s also true that you can’t beat or scare a horse into winning any race of significance and perhaps even more so in the other disciplines. One of the reasons mares and geldings and stallions of different ages and breeds show up at the top levels of show jumping and eventing is that it’s not only a question of athletic ability, the horse’s willingness to try and to be careful is a huge factor. Yes, people do questionable things like poling to enhance performance but that really only works at the margins if at all.

They’re domesticated animals, they exist to work with us. I think it’s misleading that we refer to “wild” horses in this country. They’re much more feral than wild. [/quote]

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