The World Speciesism Championships ended in Denmark this weekend. Speciesism is discrimination on the basis of species, it puts one species morally above another in similar interests. Breeding and riding planet mates for human pleasure must fall under speciesism. Another name for this could be human supremacist thinking, but people think those are nasty words, so I’ll stick to speciesism for today. Both ways of thinking allow people undisturbed to impose their will on animals.
In Herning, Denmark, speciesism came into play in the jumping, dressage and vaulting categories. This was commented on in an online talk show from the Valkenburghoeve in Oosterbeek. Annette van Trigt did the presentation, dressage riders Hans Peter Minderhoud and Tineke Bartels did the analysis and Britt Dekker was probably there because she has a very expensive tuber from John de Mol.
The audience consisted of people who, like their peers around the talk show table and the riders in Herning, probably call themselves horse lovers. In addition to the same hobby, they all have one thing in common: a distorted idea of what loving is or can be. If a horse breaks a leg, it can pay with its life for participating in a sporting event. Riders know this. Playing Russian roulette for sporting pleasure with the object of your affection should be given a name as a mental illness.
Tineke and Britt were enthusiastic about a Spanish horse. Tineke told an anecdote about a Spanish rider who used to make the public go wild by making an elegant gesture after each pirouette and leaving the ring in Spanish step. “He also had a bullfighter background.”
Britt: “Oh really?! Some kind of clown?!”
In the speciesism bubble, no one seemed to have a problem with a style that picks up on a so-called blood sport. In this case, the torture of a bull to death for the pleasure of human spectators. Blood sport is also sport, they will have thought there.
A Swiss study comparing recreational horses with sport horses showed that a sport horse goes outside for an average of two hours a day. That’s an hour longer than my father was aired per day when he was in prison under the Uruguayan dictatorship. The prisoner spent the rest of the day in his cell, a space much like a horse box: bars, latches, and water from a fountain. Contact with conspecifics is limited for both horses and prisoners.
People who have an interest in the survival of equestrian sport say that horses enjoy it a lot. They point to the animal’s pricked ears and attitude: see how much it likes to be ridden. My father and associates also went into the prison garden with their ears pricked up, they were also looking forward to it. They wore no saddles but gray overalls. They probably would have gone out too if they had to carry the jailer on their backs. Outside is outside. Herning 2022 ended on Sunday with, among other things, ‘individual jumping’ – not including the horse, of course. It is barely visible on TV, but if you look closely, you can see that the horses are wearing gray overalls under the saddles.
Carolina Trujillo is a writer.