Letter from Ted Foureagles
Horse Slaughter – August 2007 – Colorado Central Magazine
Editors:
The essay in your June edition “They shoot horses don’t they? No, they don’t” by Sharon O’Toole is a welcome eye-opener, with perhaps some points unaddressed.
First: Horses don’t necessarily exist merely to fulfill human wants and needs. They have their own life agenda, moderated of course by the extent to which they’re enslaved. Next: That we feel compelled to arrange circumstances for their remains is perhaps just our particular neurosis as a species which imagines itself worthy of dominion. I’m pretty sure horses would just as soon die from starvation rather than poison, rot on the prairie and maybe enrich the soil after feeding scavengers and bugs. At least that’s the way I’d want to be disposed of.
But slave holders do bear some responsibility for the detritus that tracks the lives of their charges — it’s the least they can do, actually. Maybe I’ve just spent too much time living here in the West of my dreams — far away from the South of my birth — to remember how heavily that detritus weighs on the life of someone like an industrial rancher. In a place where all of the land is spoken-for by subdivisions, we can’t have that stinky, unsalable corner until the old blackie, er, horse finishes rotting. Is it really that tight for ranchers already, even without reconstructive carpetbaggers? Or are the financiers of our day in the West of similar ilk?
Ted Foureagles
Pseudonymous below Horsepasture, SC
and above Shavano, CO.
