Rooting for Barbaro

"What he loved in horses was what he loved in men, the blood and heat of the blood that ran in them. All his reverence and all his fondness and all the leanings of his life were for the ardenthearted and they would always be so and never be otherwise."

--Cormac McCarthy, All The Pretty Horses

My mind has been on, among many other things, the fate of Barbaro ever since I saw that colt's hindleg bent at a gruesome, incongruous angle during the Preakness this past weekend. In thoroughbred racing, one's initial reaction, after feeling that involuntary frisson of pure horror from vicarious, bone-snapping pain, of course, is, "I hope to God that they don't have to kill him."

The New York Times recently ran an interesting, if oblivious, article asking why so many strangers would deign to care about Barbaro, or for that matter, any animal they weren't immediately connected with.

The obvious fact is that we care about strangers all of the time (US Weekly, anyone?), whether they be animal, vegetable or mineral. We're attracted to their beauty and passion and their achivement and to the fickle kleig lights of fame and fortune. Barbaro possessed all of these things in spades, drawing us to him, but ultimately his prodigious, breathtaking speed and charismatic magnificence weren't enough to prevent a small, single misstep that might just conclude his brief and brilliant life with a precipitous bullet in the brain.

It's cruel and abitrary and, well, implacably fragile.

How naive is it to think that Barbaro's story couldn't be interpreted as an immensely catharatic saga? Doesn't it fill you with terror and pity? Doesn't it move you in any way?

In this respect, Barbaro is not "just a horse." And I pray to God that he gets to live out his days walking on a repaired leg and munching on clover and sugarcubes, being the big stud he deserves to be.