Encouragement; Three-Legged Horses. I wondered aloud here May 19th if it makes sense for me to write this blog regularly, which takes some effort. I got this emailed encouragement:

I, too, as do many, find the parallels between ourselves and Rome to be striking. Welfare payments are certainly our "bread" [I did not mention welfare because the U.S. has taken very aggressive measures to prevent welfare from becoming a habitual thing] as are an economy boasting essentially full employment. The modern entertainment industry is certainly pernicious, but not the product of government policy. It simply seems to be an industry maximizing its profits by appealing to the lowest and, therefore, most common, factor. You paint a bad image of what our society has become and I agree, up to a point. But, on balance, I agree with the Roman general from "Gladiator" when he said: "Within the Empire is the light, without lies the darkness." That's why I'm an expansionist. No point in expansionism if the country isn't worth living in to begin with . . .

Your blog concerning free trade made me look at the issue in a new way. ...
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Yes, I read your blog regularly, so please don't feel as if no one reads it. I also read your Newark blog from time to time.

The same day, I got another email from a regular reader, in northern England, so I guess I will persevere.
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I have been concerned recently by all the talk we have had since the racehorse Barbaro broke his leg in the Preakness. Reporters have hastened to say of that injury that it was "life-threatening" because "horses cannot survive on three legs". Why not?
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I have a cat, another quadruped, who broke his left rear leg from no apparent cause (perhaps toxoplasmosis, a hideous attacker). Vets were unable to repair the damage but chose to amputate from about the hip. Leo gets around just fine. In walking, he is awkward. Running, however, he's a flash.
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When I was in grade school, we used to pass by, in walking to school, a yard where a little dog resided. He had NO rear legs, but ran about the yard with the help of a little two-wheel wagon attached to his rear body. So why would the loss of one leg cause the death of a horse?
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What happens to wild horses if they break a leg?
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I am not a veterinarian (and don't even play one on TV*), but it has always been plain to me that no vital organ is involved in a broken leg, so a quadruped, be it cat or horse, should not die from a broken leg. I wondered, however, if, because horses tend to sleep standing, a blood-pressure distinction or other oddity in horse anatomy could justify the assertion that horses cannot live on three legs. Hey! I have seen people with no legs and not even hips scurry about the subways looking for handouts.
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When I did a Google search on "three legged horses", I found a lot of references to a collection of stories by a Taiwanese writer, Cheng Ch'ing-wen, who apparently wrote of a 3-legged horse. I also, alas, found a horrifying article about a practice of some horse owners' selling their seriously injured animals for food.
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Plainly the leg is not a vital organ in any mammal. My thought, that perhaps circulatory problems could produce death in an animal that ordinarily sleeps standing, turns out to be false too. Horses can lie down to sleep. Indeed, one website says that horses can achieve their best sleep only lying down, on their sides.

Horses must lie down, preferably on their sides, to achieve paradoxical sleep. Paradoxical sleep is the stage where complete muscular relaxation occurs.

It's hard to know what is the best thing for the animal in the incident at issue. Horses are plainly not designed right — so much for God's perfect design — that they could break a leg simply by running, which they need to do simply to survive. How do horses survive in the wild, if simply running can break a leg, and merely breaking a leg (temporarily, until healing) can result in death, or wolves, coyotes, or other predators could easily pick off a lame horse?
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I suspect we are being lied to by media when they say that a broken leg is "life-threatening" to a horse, as suggests that a horse cannot live with a broken leg. It seems to me that of course it can live with a broken leg — unless it is killed by its owner!
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Breaking a leg does not kill a horse. Shooting a horse, or injecting powerful depressants into its body, kills a crippled horse. If the owners of horses wish to kill their horses with impunity, they need to assert that that is the better solution for the horse, and make us believe it, not suggest that if they don't kill the horse, nature will. No, nature will NOT kill a horse that merely breaks its leg. Nature (that monster) might make the rest of that horse's life hell, but, absent a powerful predator (mountain lion) or group of predators (wolves, coyotes), a horse with a broken leg will NOT die because of that injury.
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* This is a reference to the long-ago assertion by actor Peter Bergman, in endorsing Vicks Formula 44 in a TV commercial, that he was not a doctor but did play one on TV.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 2,456.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 9:46 AM