AN INTERMINABLE MONTH, the plumpest patch of summer, passes between races for my horse. During this once-a-year spasm of uninterrupted sunshine in Vancouver, it’s as if every man, woman, and child in the city has come upon a $20 bill on the street. The people I know scramble around manically, making weekend plans on island cabins or campgrounds; work becomes an obligation that’s discharged half-consciously, the way you load your dishwasher.
Still wired from the horse’s success, I want to while away this intoxication in public, where I feel my magic will have the greatest effect. Of course, the horse figures in all my social interactions, my trump card to end conversational threads involving child-rearing and yoga classes. The only hitch for me is that when I tell people I’m a part owner of a racehorse, it automatically prompts them to wisecrack, “Which part of the horse?”
After hearing that joke about six hundred times, I attempt to alter the wording. I say I am a fractional owner, a co-owner, a shareholder of a racehorse. But people still ask me which part of the horse I own. Eventually, I turn the joke around by saying I’m only part of an owner.
“Which part?” I’m then asked.
“I’ll give you a hint,” I say, holding up the back of my hand. “It’s one of these fingers.”
In June, I find myself at the wedding reception of a high-school friend in the ballroom of a harbourfront hotel. I’m seated with a couple I’ve met only twice before—the others at the table are strangers. After a prolonged debate about the wisdom of measles vaccinations for children, I allow myself to expound on Blackie. This, naturally, leads to a brief overview of horse masturbation techniques.
“Colts please themselves by thrusting their erect dinks in the air or bouncing them against their stomachs,” I say, flapping and jabbing my forearm to simulate both kinds of masturbation. The guys’ eyes gleam like polished silverware; their companions’ carry expressions of dismay.
“So would a horse breeder want to eliminate this as a way of preserving the stud’s juices?” one guy, a cousin of the bride, asks me; his wife hands him the stink-eye. “Or would the horse have enough to go around?”
I scratch my chin—only because it’s itchy. “According to my information, a horse doesn’t usually ejaculate when he masturbates,” I say. “But I also read a scholarly article that says that breeders will discourage stallions from masturbating through ‘schemes and devices such as stallion rings, brushes, and cages.’”
(In that same article, entitled “Spontaneous Erection and Masturbation in Equids,” its author, Sue M. McDonnell, also observes that “when the horse was bouncing or thrusting the penis, the facial expression usually suggested pleasure and contentment similar to the kind observed during solitary grooming. A trance-like, glazed-eye appearance was occasionally evident.”)
There’s one woman at the table who’s been brought to the wedding by her boyfriend. Earlier in the evening, our conversation about books halted shortly after she told me she only read titles about gender theory and spirituality. She works in information services at one of the local universities, has high cheekbones, frizzy black hair, and wears a nose stud.
“Let me say I’m sure this project of yours is well-meaning,” she tells me, leaning across the table. “So you might not be aware of how disgusting horseracing really is.”
“Is it because of the bean?” I ask, nodding at the dried-out piece of horse smegma lying in front of my salmon dinner.
She ignores the bean. “I’m sure you’re doing this with good intentions, but I don’t think you understand the cruelty of horseracing.”
“Have you ever even been to a racetrack?” I ask her, trying not to sound peeved as I pocket the bean again.
“I go riding horses every other weekend,” she says. “The cruelty of horseracing is well-known.”
“But have you ever been to a racetrack?” I ask again.
She deflects this question as though I’m trying to trick her into the back of my idling van. The tone of voice she adopts isn’t argumentative, but lulling, like an adult trying to talk a child out of an irrational fear. “At the track, horses die every day from broken legs and bleeding lungs. Do you know that?”
Her boyfriend looks away, sawing through his chicken breast intently.
“But that’s only a fraction of the races,” I say limply. In fact, it’s four in every thousand races in North America—and the ratio continues dropping.
“And every day, horses, which are natural pack animals, live in confined spaces.”
“Dogs and cats are pack animals, too,” someone at the table suggests, “but no one thinks it’s cruel when people adopt them.”
“Horses get used to being in stalls,” I add.
Right then, someone at the head table starts clinking his wineglass, and the attention of the room shifts. The Woman Who Hates Horseracing waits until the bride and groom smooch. “They don’t get used to it,” she announces into the applause that accompanies the matrimonial osculation. “Their spirits are broken.”
NOWADAYS, GOING TO the track when my horse isn’t racing is like being a parent at a kids’ soccer game that doesn’t involve his own child. Okay, it’s less disturbing than that, but you know what I mean—it’s not as fun. And yet, in the long stretch between contests for Blackie, I can’t stay away from Hastings. The gambling bug has fixed onto me and has exploded from too much blood.
Visiting the track prompts me to ask myself continually how to proceed when you love doing something you’ll never be good at doing. Normally, with newfound passions that require talent and practice, either I dabble and lose interest (e.g., with darts and bowling) or I go full-tilt and lose perspective (e.g., with online Scrabble). I’m starting to realize I’ll never be a successful horseplayer—I’m both too cautious and too indifferent. Whatever I bet I can afford to lose, but I don’t want to make wild, uninformed wagers, either. As well, when I open the Form, I start copy editing for style and grammar.
This last realization proves inspiring one Sunday afternoon. Maybe what I need to do, if I can’t win money, is to meld the sport with my own actual talents. As a word nerd, I should instead master racing’s idioms and slang, an achievable goal that also serves another non-essential purpose. I remove my to-do list from the wall above my computer and strike a line through one of my items:
1. BECOME A HOME OWNER BOUGHT A RACEHORSE
2. FIND TRUE LOVE VISITED A BREEDING SHED
3. SETTLE DOWN & START A FAMILY
4. SEE THE WORLD
5. LEARN ANOTHER LANGUAGE TALKED LIKE A RAILBIRD
6. START A RETIREMENT PLAN REDUCED GAMBLING LOSSES
7. GET A TATTOO
I’ve already learned from Randi that a horse that “pukes” in a race quit in it—and didn’t actually hurl; that an apprentice rider is called a “bug boy” because the asterisk beside his name on the program is insect-like; the favourite in a race is called “the chalk” from the days when odds were tallied, and erased, on a blackboard; a “rabbit” is a horse that runs up front early in the race, setting the pace before finishing well behind it; and that “Upset” is the name of the only horse who beat Man o’ War. (It’s been erroneously claimed that the meaning of the word “upset” as an underdog victory originated from this 1919 race.) While I know I’ll never pass for a horseman, at least I can use their lingo properly.
Aside from an occasional copy error, the Form is another joyous source of esoteric language. It has race information found in the program, like previous race results, Beyer Speed Figures (designed by Washington Post columnist and star handicapper Andrew Beyer to account for differences in distance and track surface to provide a standardized rating of a horse’s speed), and trainer winning percentages, but it also contains an excess of commentary. Riffling through my copy one summer Sunday, I can’t help thinking that the racetrack could use some of the PR spin and the coddling euphemisms of constructive criticism seen in every other corner of public discourse.
I mean, in what other context would “failing to menace” be such a bad thing? Boxing, I guess. But in most other places, failing to menace would be regarded more positively, and in other occupations, children’s entertainment or restaurant hostessing, say, it would be grounds for a positive workplace evaluation. How about instead of failed to menace, maybe made everyone feel at home? Similarly, a horse that set pace, gave way should be described as didn’t need to prove anything, okay with himself. Why beat up on a horse that already lost?
But in fact, I’m here this Sunday not for the reading material, but to meet with Chad Hoverson, the most veteran rider at Hastings. After I befriended him in the cafeteria, Hoverson invited me into the jocks’ room, where the riders dress and mill about. I’ve told him that I’m hoping to land a magazine assignment about the subject—a few years ago, I sold an article about the grooms imported from Mexico to deal with a labour shortage—but in truth, I just need a pretext for a peek-a-boo.
The space is lined with stalls for the riders. The veteran riders have marked their areas with engraved nameplates; other, friskier jockeys have covered their stalls with topless girlie photos. Near the front of the room the riders are weighed by the enchantingly named Clerk of Scales. Valets hurry around with riding equipment and towels. The track simulcast plays on a screen in the middle of the room.
As I sit with Hoverson, the jocks’ room disappoints me with its camaraderie and locker-room ball-breaking—I was, in fact, hoping for more friction. The fifty-five-year-old assures me it’s only jolly before the races begin.
“There was a fight the other day. One of the riders was mad at another one and the screaming got into fighting,” Hoverson explains patiently in Idaho-bred American English. “It isn’t like we all have our own private rooms. Stuff happens out there where things don’t go right, you know, whether it’s a guy who shuts you off, and the heat of the moment will get to you.”
I find it hard to imagine Hoverson, who has blue eyes and thick, sandy-brown hair, in a jock-room brawl, not because he doesn’t seem tough—the previous week I saw him with a black eye after he was thrown from a horse who clipped heels with an opponent—but because the veteran is probably the most courtly man I’ve met at Hastings. His unflappable good manners stand in contrast to the informal, off-colour worldviews found in the backstretch and belie the stereotype of jockeys as the Shetland pony–sized rock stars of the track.
Some jocks, of course, would argue they’ve earned their egos. After all, they ride hunched over their thousand-pound horses, their asses in the air, perpendicular to their feet. To approximate that position at home, try wrapping a bungee cord around a pole and then holding on to it while you lower yourself to a ninety-degree sitting position. And then place that pole on the bed of a truck going thirty-five miles an hour on a curving, bumpy road while someone throws mud in your eyes. Then ride a mechanical bull in a telephone booth to simulate the pain of being thrown by a horse coming out of the starting gate. I’ve been trail-riding twice and am sore just sitting on a horse as she walks.
Compared with grooms and hot walkers, the top jockeys are certainly paid like stars. Minus the quarter he gives to his agent, a jockey makes $50 per mount and ten percent of the purse. In 2008, for instance, Mario Gutierrez, then twenty-two, was the top rider at Hastings with $1,580,274 in winnings on 427 starts. Even at this small-time track, the top riders do pretty well for six months’ work, with some of them also finding spots at winter tracks. By contrast, a less-established rider or an apprentice, someone who hasn’t quite learned how to control the power of the horse and intuitively sense the pace of the race, might have to supplement his living as a gallop boy.
Hoverson, who’s worked in over two dozen tracks including Santa Anita and Churchill Downs, arrived at the track at 5:30 AM to work horses, which helps him gain a sense of a thoroughbred’s tendencies and preferences. His first ride is a colt—a maiden who “failed to menace” in his two trips to the gate this season—in a six-and-a-half-furlong spring for $25,000 claimers. At 10-to-1, the horse was given the second-longest preliminary odds by the morning line handicapper. “If I get lucky, I hope to lay about third in the race,” he says, sitting on the bench in his stall. “He can run a bit but he’s still a little green and hasn’t quite figured the game out yet. I try to give him a clean trip and teach him things. You can only do what they’ll let you.”
Hoverson slips on the blue-and-white silks that belong to the owner of the horse. “The average rider has maybe a ten percent effect on the performance of the horse,” he says. “You’ve got to feel what horses are capable of, what they’re happy with. You’ve got to place your hands where they like it. Some horses like a shorter cross, some like a longer, leaner cross. Some of them don’t want much of a hold; some do.”
A buzzer sounds inside the jocks’ room—fifteen minutes until the race—and the jockeys move into the paddock, where they make anxious banter with trainers and owners and mount their horses for the post parade. From the grandstand, I watch the race go how Hoverson doesn’t want it to go. Rather than lying third, his young horse trails immediately after departing the gate, lingering on the outside from the first turn and hanging back throughout the race.
I wander back into the jocks’ room after the race. “The horse is just being timid,” he tells me, mopping the mud beard caked on the bottom half of his face with a sponge. “He’s got more than that, but when a horse moves beside him you can feel him twitch. Instead of running like he can, running free, he’s running with me pushing him, and at this point in time I can’t make him go quickly as I could in the past.”
Hoverson, while still the track’s sixth-leading rider, is ever mindful that he’s in his professional homestretch. Last year at Hastings was supposed to be the final meet for the jock, who had attended steward school in anticipation of an office job in the racing world, but the rough economy pushed him back into the saddle. In the past he would pick up eight or nine mounts in a day; now he takes only five or six to preserve his body. I ask him whether he’ll miss racing.
“I’ll struggle with it, but I can’t do this forever,” he tells me. “To be around these guys, it’s my life.”
At this moment, as though to give lie to his homily, another jockey named Dave Wilson strolls by to sass him: “There’s a muck sack if I’ve ever seen one.”
Later on, after heading outside and losing more money, I get a chance to speak with this piss-taking rider before the eighth race. Wilson, who was on the winner for the seventh race, is forty-one and has closely shaven hair, light blue eyes, a pinkish, newborn’s complexion, and a buoyant grin. He’s been the top rider at Hastings twice and last year won the B.C. Derby, the biggest race of the meet, on a horse that Hoverson had passed on. Yesterday, Wilson rode in all nine races. Today, he’s practically a part-timer with six.
A seventeen-year veteran of racing, Wilson was a truck driver and already a young father—“I was young, dumb, and full of come”—when he first entered racing. “I wanted to take an air brakes course to upgrade my licence and the guy that was running the course owned a horse with a trainer. He said, ‘Why do you want to drive a truck? You won’t make no money.’ So he brought me here. I’d only been on a horse once, but I had the right size and the right temperament: I liked going fast.”
This temperament must also include a taste for pain. Wilson has broken a leg, pulled all the muscles on his ankles, and has been in fights—most recently, this season. “It was over stupid stuff about bumping into somebody, cutting somebody off,” he tells me. “It happened two or three times. We were just beaking at each other for two or three weeks, then we just happened to go.”
“Who won?” I ask, a smile crawling across my face as I imagine two little guys fighting—a windmill blur of wiry muscle, fluorescent fabric, and competitive spite.
Wilson grins. “I’d call it a draw. He may have had the upper hand a bit.”
As we talk, Keveh Nicholls, a twenty-three-year-old rider from Barbados who was on Blackie for her first race of the season, yells something at Wilson. I can’t make sense of what he’s saying over the chattering of other riders; to my disappointment as a voyeur, they don’t seem to be fighting words.
“He’s talking to the younger kind of crowd,” beaks Wilson, who’s a decade younger than Hoverson.
“Story-telling Dave,” says Nicholls, who’s on the tall side for a jockey, has a set of short dread locks on his head, and is wearing yellow and green silks. “Ask him what happened after the first jump,” he says to me, his eyes dancing merrily. “Why was he in my spot?”
I turn to Wilson with a goading, are-you-seriously-going-to-take-that-crap-from-him? expression, but he’s smiling:
“It was a good spot to be in.”
TWO DAYS AFTER our conversation at the wedding, the Woman Who Hates Horseracing sends me an email with a video link. “It might help you understand the issue from a more open-minded perspective,” she writes, “if you saw this.”
The video is entitled “Horse Racing: Cruelty Behind the Glamour” and set to sober, urgent piano music. Still images of horses falling face down into tracks or crashing over jumps in steeplechase events as gruesome details flash on title cards: “As pets or in the wild, horses run short distances at high speeds. For races, they are drugged, beaten and given intense training. They are expected to run a mile in under 2 minutes.”
This isn’t the first video I’ve seen like this. Horsemen will say that the bad stuff is rare and far outweighed by the positives. I’m inclined to agree, but still wish the bad stuff weren’t so terrifying. Even ardent racing enthusiasts shudder at the memory of high-profile thoroughbreds like 2006 Derby winner Barbaro and 2008 Derby runner-up Eight Belles breaking down on the track, or of other, less celebrated horses being euthanized in hastily erected tents on the oval. A close-up photo of Barbaro’s leg snapping while leaving the gate at the Preakness is memorably horrific.
Economics and the larceny of some horsemen also figure into the anti-racing argument. The 1986 Kentucky Derby and 1987 Breeders’ Cup Classic winner Ferdinand was sent to slaughter in 2002 by his owners in Japan when his stud fees were no longer paying for his upkeep. Seventies champion Alydar, a successful studhorse, was murdered to collect a $20 million insurance payout in 1990.
That said, the trouble with this kind of video is how facts and statistics are used, without proper context, in the service of an eight-year-old’s worldview. You could make a similar video, with equally gut-twisting images and misleading factoids, about dogs biting children and construct an emotionally persuasive case against dog ownership. You could screen images of unhappy kids and list a string of appalling statistics about child abuse to argue against human reproduction. These are only slightly more exaggerated examples of this onscreen rhetoric.
I doubt anyone who made this video has seen the kindness and devotion lavished on thoroughbreds I’ve witnessed firsthand. So I take exception with the video’s suggestion that the only solution to eliminating racing fatalities is by banning the sport—with its tradition, culture, and economy—altogether. It’s worth arguing that there aren’t enough safeguards in the sport, but the racing industry has taken measures to enhance the welfare of the animals: reportedly safer artificial racing surfaces are required in California and a padded “Smurf” whip is employed at Woodbine in Toronto.
Another argument horsemen make is that thoroughbreds actually want to race; those who don’t are quickly sent away from the track and turned into riding horses. In some ways, thoroughbreds are like the jockeys themselves: both destined to be in the sport by the circumstances of their birth (i.e., the stature of the jockeys, the lineage of the horses), but also by their temperaments. A true racehorse lives for the daily stimulation of training and the excitement that only comes from racing; if some breeds of horses are like Labrador retrievers, the thoroughbred is the equine equivalent of a border collie—an animal that’s flummoxed and thwarted by the idea of sitting around, doing nothing.
This is the line of reasoning Randi uses. Obviously I am no expert on horses, but I’m certain the horses in Randi’s stable aren’t miserable. Even the mere suggestion that she somehow partakes in the cruelty of animals is personally offensive.
“I remember being a kid and finding out about the seal hunt and being so upset I wrote a letter to a government official,” Randi says when I tell her about the Woman Who Hates Horseracing. “I still have it somewhere. It’s so funny. I mean, life sucks—deal with it.”
In the stables at the track, floor fans are blasting in front of each stall, whipping back the manes and forelocks of Randi’s horses and making them seem as though they’re stars in a video for an eighties hair band like Cinderella or Mr. Big.
“You could die crossing the street,” Randi adds. “At least they’re not bored here. The worst life for a horse is being rented out for everyone to ride. Those fuckers hate that shit.”
“You mean, for birthday parties and shit?” I ask.
“You know, when you put on a bunch of people who don’t know what the fuck they’re doing, they’re fucking miserable,” she says. “They can’t wait to be finished. It’s just the same as having a job.”
It’s not hard to see why Randi would consider boredom the utmost act of cruelty.
“It’s like getting a racehorse to deliver the mail,” I say.
Randi laughs. “I like that.”
SOMETIME AFTER THIS conversation, I find myself assigned to write a magazine story about the killing of wild horses in the foothills of Sundre, Alberta. It’s a story I pitch partly because of my experiences at the track.
After flying into Calgary, I travel an hour and a half north to Sundre to meet the founders of the Wild Horses of Alberta Society, Doreen and Bob Henderson. Bob, a retired twenty-six-year veteran of the Calgary police, has blue-grey eyes that draw in when he smiles; Doreen has dark hair with highlights splashed across her bangs and a pinhead-sized nose stud. As Bob drives out of Sundre proper, the hills in the distance are covered with dirty-blond grass with patches of snow like dandruff.
For the Hendersons, a shared passion for horses is the linchpin to their marriage. “We came from different persuasions,” Bob tells me from behind the wheel. “I have a police background and am a country cowboy. She was a city girl—a headbanger, a rock ’n’ roll queen.”
Doreen learned to ride as a child. “I got away from horses until I met Bob,” she explains. “Then I bought my own and we started our life together. We’re both horse-crazy.”
The Hendersons fell in love with the wild horses on their long rides through these hills and have two rescued “wildies” on their acreage. They formed their group in 2002, after learning that someone had shot, cut, and gutted two horses. Since those murders, there have been a total of thirty known killings of these animals.
There are three hundred or so wild horses in the Sundre foothills. Bob and Doreen believe they carry traces of the Spanish mustangs brought to North America in the 1500s and cite an 1808 diary entry by explorer David Thompson describing the horses in the area. The Alberta government, however, asserts that the wild horses are descendants of domesticated equines from the turn of the twentieth century. Their official position is that the horses are not actually wild, but feral—domesticated animals that have gone un-tame and have intruded upon a landscape. In other words, they’re as foreign as the white men they helped settle this area.
Almost an hour into our drive, in Parker Ridge, about twenty-five miles from Banff National Park, Bob hits the brakes. “There’s one in the woods,” he says, as the car comes to a full stop on a logging road. “There’s another.”
I struggle to catch sight of them, but then the horses advance up through the grove of pine trees and squirt out onto the road, maybe a half-furlong in front of us.
We step outside the car. The horses, shaggy in their winter coats like plush animals, are shorter and smaller than the thoroughbreds I’ve become familiar with, but their chests are wider and their hindquarters are thicker. Wild horses travel in bands—a stallion, his harem of mares, and their foals—that rarely number over a dozen; they’re often stalked by bachelor herds of young male horses that haven’t yet started their own families. There are six horses in this band, including a foal.
The horses watch us with low-key curiosity, and as Bob takes photos with a zoom lens the size of a pepper grinder, I hide my moistening eyes behind my own camera. The band, following the lead of the boss mare, turn their backs towards us and run down the road, before melting into the forest again. The stallion, who will defend his band from bears, coyotes, wolves, and cougars, stays on the road, snorting and puffing at us.
“He’s saying, ‘Stand back,’” Doreen tells me. “‘Keep away.’”
“They normally hang around longer,” Bob says as the stallion leaves sight. “They’re worried about the foal. But you can see how they will linger around people.”
“We wish they were more distrustful,” Doreen says. “They’d have a better chance of survival.”
“How can anyone say they’re not wild?” Bob asks me.
That day, we’ll see a few more bands of horses, closer up and of varying numbers. We’ll also pay our respects to the skeletal remains of a stallion murdered the previous December in a clearing by the road. For me, nothing underscores the difference between the so-called abuses at the racetrack and the undeniable cruelty of a wild animal murdered for pleasure than the sight of the slaughtered horse’s tail lying on the other side of the road, carried and dropped there by a coyote.
And yet the image of that first band of horses rattles in my head for days afterwards. I was startled by the emotion that those horses inspired in me. At the sight of something so wonderful, I was reminded of the chain of events that led me here, beginning with my decision to buy a racehorse. If you asked me a year earlier what I’d be doing now, I’d never have guessed I’d be here. How could I?