Mauvais Cheval
Un chevalier parfait
- Feb 12, 2024
- 218
- 846
- AFL Club
- Collingwood
Did you see that article about 500 horses dying somewhere? I just saw the article in passing. I thought you would be in mourning... or do you narrow your fetish down into particular breeds etc. I shouldn't really send this post. It gets into areas that are weird
Yes I did see the news. There appears to have been an illegal knackery operating near Wagga and 500 dead horses from there were found in a creek bed.
Am I in mourning? It is distressing. I mourn the senseless slaughter of many creatures, human or not. For me horses hold a special place. I believe we do not really own our horses, they are a gift from life to remind us what it means to be alive. A gift we often squander, or misuse, or abuse.
The ugly secret of the thoroughbred horse industry is a conservative 8000 horses slaughtered for pet food each year. Australia has the second largest breeding Industry on the planet, we breed massively large numbers, way more than can ever be accommodated in the racing industry and find a home after. Mass horse killing is mathematically factored into the industry. It doesnt take much knowledge of the industry to know it.
But I know that children murdered in Gaza means we cannot talk of anything else as nothing else matters or can ever be seen as worthy of our sympathies. Reductio at absurdum, Markfs style.
Horses are important to me because of how they entered my life. I was as lost as it is possible to be after three years in foster care bouncing around the system like a pinball. I had shut down so bad my foster carers sent me to stay with friends of theirs on the Dargo high plains to see if a different environment could do some good. I had never known anything about horses at all till then, and they were kind of terrifying but unknowable.
Lost in my own horrors I took to sitting on a fence just dissociating. There was a horse in that enclosure, a brumby that had been captured as a yearling in a cull, from a time when the solution to feral horse numbers was that rather than shooting them. Suddenly out of the blue I felt a nose nudging my chest, and this strange creature was right in front of me, having overcome his fear of what could have been a horse murdering monster, and instead submitting to the curiosity that is the other half of horse nature.
I learned much from that yearling colt, a being as lost and frightened as I was. Horses are very beneficial for therapy for people with PTSD. They are incredibly attuned to our feelings, and once you learn horse body language, you can see what you are thinking mirrored in them, if you know what to look for. Even when you dont consciously realise how ****ed up you are and how much you are broadcasting that. After I learned to ride, I was able to later take part in gentling him and training him, until we were a formidable team mustering cattle, something I still do when able and needed.
He lived there for many years, and in more recent years I have been able to buy him and bring him to live with me. I still recognise that I dont really own him. More he owns me really, but you need to know horses to understand. One of the more emotional moments in my life was being able to teach my own son to ride on him, and seeing Rangi my horse take infinite care of him.
My "fetish", Markfs, is trying somehow, when it seems most impossible, to find something of beauty and grace that speaks to the joy and possibility of life when there is almost nothing but dark and holding onto that like a drowning man reaching for a life preserver. Horses symbolise that to me. Your mileage may vary.
I am acutely aware of my own mental health struggles. At the age of 11 I was r*ped and tortured by my mum's boyfriend with my mum's involvement, for many months. My nights consist of the certain knowledge that at some point I will be plunged into vivid nightmares experiencing those events as if happening anew and I cant escape. I am typing this looking out at the back shed, where I hung myself during COVID because I had reached the end of the line and I had no strength to go on. My partner found me and had to cut me down, something I know stands between us even today.
What I have tried to do though, and yes not always succeeded, is not to use that as an excuse to just be an arseh*le for no reason, and revel in that rationalisation and find ways to blame everyone else but myself.
Also I learned a lot about the power of anger, of hatred, of fear, or living at the sufferance of others, and the powerful lure of revenge when you find you have the power. When I was 14 in a group home and one of the youngest there, our band of boys was led by a damaged psycho. After a night where he got me majorly drunk, he r*ped me. Unfortunately, abuse and horror doesnt end when kids are placed in care, it just mutates thanks to how ****ed our system is.
So I hatched a plan. Next time we went on a drinking binge, I made sure to drink coke and top up his booze. Back at the house he was paralytic. He was at my mercy, and nobody would stop me. He had no friends see, only hangers on. Thats often the way with psychopaths, they are surrounded by like minded folks as averse to sticking their neck out as they are.
I desperately wanted to do to him what he did to me. For once in my life to feel powerful, to make someone else feel like I had been made to feel. My only mate in that home stopped me, and reminded me of what that would cost me. Because in doing that, I would simply become just like him, and lose whatever was left of me that was any good at all.
My mate calmly and quielty hanged himself during COVID and succeeded. I had to make the call to turn off his life support, and I regret I felt along with unbearable grief a sense of jealousy. He was free. I then tried myself, and I guess I suck at it.
Over my life I have developed then particular things that I find really hard to take from repeated personal experience. The easy lure of the power that comes from revenge and disfigures your soul like nothing on earth. The easy charm of the person who gains a feeling of satisfaction making others feel weak and helpless. The destructive force of someone using their struggles as a pass card to avoid trying to change and instead finds the chaos they can create a substitute for a life. And most of all, the relentlessly negative obsessive who decides to bring everyone else down to their level to make themselves feel better. Ive seen so many of all of them in my life I could genuinely vomit. If any of you in this thread recognise yourselves in this paragraph, so be it.
I have learned to survive, somehow. But in the service of survival I lost what it meant to be alive.
I am still here, but I know that wont last for long. A consequence of my attempt to die is constant bleeding in my brain which will claim me soon enough. But I have at least learned that even now, it matters to keep reaching for that hope, that possibility and joy of life while I still can aspire to. That is my fetish. And knowing whatever my crimes and failings, I will at least never be you.
And in service of that desire to keep reaching for the joy, my time here is done.