musings on fillies

I have to confess that the sudden and awful death of Eight Belles brought me to tears this past weekend. Don't get me wrong, I'm not a big horse racing fan. I went to the races once, several years ago, to watch the Belmont Stakes out on Long Island. I lost $5 and decided that betting clearly isn't my thing. My brother tries to make mint juleps, or at least buy a bottle of bourbon and a bunch of mint, most years on Kentucky Derby Saturday. This is pretty much the extent of my exposure to real horse-racing.

But I was a huge Walter Farley fan as a kid, and followed avidly the adventures of the Black Stallion and his boy, Alec. My favorite book of the whole bunch was about the Black Stallion's daughter, Black Minx, and the trials and tribulations of taking on the big boys in the racing world. It's a rare filly that makes it into the Derby, or any of the Triple Crown races, for that matter. Eight Belles was one of only 38 fillies to ever even start in the Kentucky Derby, and in the 134 years it's been run, only three fillies have won, most recently in 1988. Three fillies also have won the Belmont Stakes, last year's Rags to Riches being the first in over a century to do so. Four fillies have won the Preakness, but the most recent, Nellie Morse, ran in 1924. In this context, Eight Belles' second place finish was impressive in its own right, but even more so now that word has it she may have injured herself coming off a turn and yet ran flat out in the homestretch, trying to catch the front-runner.

PETA, of course, is up in arms against horse-racing in general, dirt tracks more specifically, and Eight Belles' jockey most specifically of all, as if going after a 20-year-old kid can change an entire industry. And then, as Edward McClellan points out in an interesting piece in Salon, there's the actual physical make-up of horses, these 1500 pound creatures racing at speeds of up to 40 miles per hour, putting all their weight on one hoof at a time, on legs that don't actually have any muscle below the knees. If you think about it, it's kind of amazing these fatal injuries don't happen more often.

So, I don't know. Is horse-racing as inhumane as PETA would like to have us think? Does its status as a time-honored tradition dating back to pre-industrial revolution days make it respectable enough to be also acceptable? There's something glorious about horse-racing, something beautiful and powerful and romantic and fast as the wind, but then again I was obsessed with the Black as a child so who am I to say?

On a last note, thinking about the Walter Farley books got me to remembering some of my other favorite books as a child, specifically a few of Marguerite Henry's rather impressive oeuvre, Misty of Chincoteague, Justin Morgan Had a Horse, and King of the Wind. I'm hoping that they might be squirreled away somewhere in my mother's garage out in Washington, but somehow I imagine they went the way of so many other childhood objects of affection, and that makes me a little bit sad. I'm sure they've all been reissued, but what I wouldn't give for my father's copy of Justin Morgan had a Horse, originally published in 1945, in all its much-beloved, well-worn, intergenerational glory.