Barbaro: A Darwinian Obituary
Illustration by Jim Cooke, from deadspin.com
In our ongoing quest for reassurance that humans are the culmination of millions of years of evolution, we continue to take great comfort in exploiting for our own amusement those species who fail to live up to our standard of intelligence – meaning all other species. Such “lesser” creatures are undeserving of our respect and are most likely too stupid to even appreciate the enjoyment their small brains would generate from having an autonomous existence anyway, right?
Now I'm not some tree-hugging, spray-paint toting PETA activist or anything. As an avid lover of all geographical variations on pulled-pork BBQ, I myself have dealt out a fair share of disrespect to the animal kingdom. But eating meat is different; while I often find myself feeling a great deal of regret after downing what used to be a pig's deltoid muscle, there's a certain amount of evolutionary necessity at work here that in the end frees me of much of my guilt. I’m sure there are plenty of vegetarians out there who would argue that in modern society we no longer need to eat meat to survive, and would consider doing so morally questionable. This may be true, but come on, we’ve evolved to eat meat. Our tangled bowels can’t even begin to digest cellulose, the major component in plant cell walls, but we have extensive enzymatic protein digestion pathways. If you don’t mind hopping on the fast train from “is” to “ought”, than there’s certainly at least some justification for ravaging meaty muscle.
I'm instead concerned with the chauvinistic ritual of horse racing. The act of imprisoning another species and forcing it to run around a man-made track with a four-foot tall disciplinarian on its back until it stumbles, busts its cannon, sesamoid, and long pastern bones, and eight months later gets euthanized by a University of Pennsylvania veterinarian.
This is what happened to the 2006 Kentucky Derby winner, Barbaro. Barbaro won last year's derby and was immediately heralded by the press as the next Secretariat. Two weeks later, as he fled the starting line during the Preakness Stakes in Baltimore, he suffered his devastating accident and was never able to fully recover. And for what? So that a handful of southern aristocrats in white Colonel Sanders suits and Forbes 500 CEOs can drink mint juleps and throw away a few grand on a hopeless trifecta.
Now I’d like to make it clear that there are an awful lot of questionable animal practices going on in the world at this very moment, some related to food production and some not, many of which I take issue with (ie, zoo conditions, sport hunting, the recent skinning of live dogs to make Sean John jackets, the way Frank Purdue houses his poultry, etc). And though I’ll not be touching on such matters, I in no way intend to brush off their importance – I’m simply using horse racing as an example of the grave and despicable way in which we humans sometimes treat our earthly companions. I mean, how fucked up is it that we have to administer the diuretic furosemide (Lasix) to equine racers to prevent them from bleeding out of their noses during competition?! And if I may return to food for a moment: at least us carnivores can further settle our guilty conscience knowing that there’s an ever-expanding movement pushing for more humane practices in the meat industry. You’ve got the growing popularity of free-range, antibiotic-free chicken and grass-fed beef, and just last month, Smithfield Foods, the world’s largest pork producer, announced they plan to stop imprisoning pigs in tiny “gestation crates” in favor of group pens. While this in no way justifies the years of animal cruelty doled out by companies like Smithfield or Perdue, at least it’s a start. As far as I know, there’s no push for cruelty-free horse-racing.
Enter Darwin
In his 1977 compilation of essays, Ever Since Darwin: Reflections in Natural History, Professor of Paleontology and popular science writer Stephen Jay Gould postulated that the reason Charles Darwin's theory of evolution was so controversial with his peers was not due to any specific scientific qualms per se, but rather to the fact that it was a slap in the face of Western dominance – meaning it didn’t support Euro-American notions of directional evolutionary supremacy. Let me explain:
The term "evolution" has gone through several mutations over the years, and is often used to convey progress – as in "we've evolved from apes and are therefore the new and improved version of our shit-slinging ancestors." It was this school of thought that was, sadly, often applied to the various human races and used to justify years of inequality – resulting in numerous schematic depictions of the evolutionary hierarchy, from the hunched simian, through the various races, and ending with the high-browed white man sitting proudly on top. But Mr. Darwin's work made no mention of progress or direction. In fact, he cautioned against using the words "higher" or "lower" when comparing species, as no one species is any better than another. Darwin even shied away from using the term “evolution” to describe his theory, instead opting for the clunkier, but more accurate, "descent with modification." In the parlance of 19th Century England, the word "evolution" implied improvement from simple to complex, and it was only applied to Darwin's work after the fact by the proud-to-be-Victorian philosopher and political scientist Herbert Spencer.
Darwin's theory was actually far less complex than this orthogenetic model - simply stated, he postulated that those species best adapted to their environment at a particular place and time will survive and pass on their genes through reproduction, and those unfit for their surroundings will not. Hence the well-known evolutionary tagline, "survival of the fittest," coined by none other than Mr. Spencer (who apparently fancied himself Darwin’s hypeman). The definition of "success" in evolutionary terms is simply survival itself in one's particular environment until one is able to reproduce. Not intelligence, or big brains, or upright posture, or white skin.
As Gould so eloquently put it, "the degeneracy of a parasite is as perfect as the gait of a gazelle,” meaning that a species as horrific as a tapeworm (or whatever other nasty little blood-sucking mooch you can think of) is just as evolutionarily sophisticated as you or I or Dr. Gould. One species can be more “complex” than another, but none is “higher,” or “better” than any other. There are numerous examples in which evolution has resulted in decreased complexity, as evident by the fact that the number of vertebrate jaw bones gets smaller from fish to reptiles to mammals – and that horse feet have evolved from having multiple toes to a single hoof.
And this brings me back to Barbaro. In the fundamentalist sense of the theory, evolution would deem both humans and horses successful, because we're both still here and actively reproducing. Why then is one species being forced to participate in a completely involuntary – and in Barbaro's case, lethal – sporting competition for absolutely no reason other than because humans enjoy wagering money on it?
The concept of exaptation is defined as a biological adaptation in which the current biological function was not the function the adaptation was originally naturally selected for. Examples include fish gills, which developed as a filter feeding system but now function as respiratory organs. In a sense all these silly activities humans engage in – such as horse racing, or writing, or whittling, anything really – are exaptations. We weren’t naturally selected to be good at crossword puzzles, but the fact that some of us are is a biological byproduct of our complex brains. And it’s thanks to our big brains and wide array of useful exaptations (such as genetic engineering, cloning, birth control, and breeding) that we are able to exert control over the horse population - and there’s little they can do about it, save the occasional femur-shattering horseshoe kick.
However, by no means does this mean we’re any “better” than horses. In a world where 99 percent of all species that have ever lived have gone extinct, horses have done pretty well for themselves over the last few million years. But the fact that humans have become so complex and intelligent, and are thus conscious of and able to manipulate evolution, opens up an entirely new can of theoretical worms.
Tinkering with the Tinkerer
We are able to exert external control over the evolution of other species through technological advancement and artificial selection. Darwin himself recognized this, and he referred to artificial selection in agricultural practices as part of his argument for natural selection. Through selective breeding and cultivation, we’re able to alter the fitness of certain species ourselves.
For presumably the first time in the history of the world a species has the capability to intentionally impose mass extinction on other species – if humans wanted to, we could see to it that nearly all horses were exterminated. In this example, it’s difficult not to conclude that humans are, in a certain sense, the “better” species, but we’re just more adaptable; it’s undeniable that humans are far better at adapting to environmental challenges than other species on Earth, the annual Darwin Awards notwithstanding.
When it comes to horses, it may be that they aren't as genetically fit for the modern world as they once were, thanks to us well-adapted humans. The practice of horse breeding goes back hundreds, if not thousands, of years and has severely altered the natural course of horse evolution towards traits beneficial to human existence, like strength and endurance for long distance travel and wagon pulling, or a lean physique and speed in the case of racing horses. Nowadays, horse breeding has taken an even more artificial turn with techniques like embryo transfer, gamete intrafallopian transfer, and artificial insemination. In thoroughbred racing horses like Barbaro, it turns out these specific practices are outlawed by the governing body of horse breeding, the Jockey Club. A horse can only be registered a thoroughbred, and thus eligible to compete for horse racing’s illustrious Triple Crown, if it was conceived out of traditional horse-on-horse action. But thanks to Barbaro’s tragic accident, and to the frustration of many, he was never able to gain enough strength back to participate in the pleasures of mating. That said, Barbaro’s owners were ready and waiting to whore out his DNA, so much so that they had his virility insured in the event he was unable to perform his studly duties. It was estimated that had he recovered, Barbaro could have raked in $1 million a year in exchange for his mating services.
So while there may be artificial forces at work here pulling the evolutionary reins one way or another, it is still possible to say, in the spirit of Darwin, that horses are our evolutionary equal. Another way of looking at the situation is that maybe humans corralling up the horse population and making them run in circles against their will is part of the modern horse environment, and that even in this unnatural setting, they’re nonetheless able to survive and reproduce. They've successfully adapted to their new milieu and are more than able to put up with our breeding whims. Plus, maybe the playing field will be leveled again once we’ve drained our nonrenewable resources and have no oil left to run our fancy machines, laboratories, and starting gates – Planet of the Horses, perhaps?
So I hope I’ve swayed you from thinking that we humans are evolutionarily more advanced than our equine companions. Maybe that’s why I still can't help feeling guilty every year as I get roped into some mint julep-chugging get-together, watching my so-called "equal" charge around the track at the Kentucky Derby. I guess I just need to come to terms with the situation and look on the bright side - at least they're not extinct, right? But to further ease my conscience, I'd like to ask a favor of all you aristocratic horse owners, jockeys, and compulsive gamblers out there - if you insist on making a horse exert himself to the point where he falls, breaks his leg, and dies for no apparent reason, at least provide some evolutionary closure and eat the poor creature.
RIP Barbaro.
References
Gould SJ. 1977. Ever Since Darwin: Reflections in Natural History. New York:W.W. Norton.
Gould SJ. 2002. The Structure of Evolutionary Theory. Cambridge: Belknap Press.
Gould SJ. 1997. Darwinian Fundamentalism. New York Review of Books. 44(10).
Mayr E. 2001. What Evolution Is. New York: Basic Books.
Dougherty MJ. 1998. Ask the Experts: Is the human race evolving or devolving? Sci Am.
Slaughter R, Skulan J. 2001. Did human hunting cause mass extinction? Science 294(5546):1459-62.
