Fall of the house of Horse

There's something just a little bit sad, and a little bit mad, about the way I collect horse pictures on the internet.

When I was a kid, I didn't have too many options. I had my horse books, such as King of the Wind (with Wesley Dennis' glorious illustrations of the sun-colored Godolphin Arabian) and the odd rerun of My Friend Flicka or Fury. For a short time I had a horse of my own - and I am sure I did not appreciate it at the time. These are among the sweetest memories I have, so it seems incredible to me that after a while, I lost interest. How stupid we are, or can be, in hindsight.

But the internet opened up whole new vistas of horse porn. When I started collecting photos about five years ago, they were mostly teeny and of poor quality. All that has changed. I mean, look at this thing! It's breathtaking, almost beyond horse.

But I've also noticed some things about horses.

They have changed.

This 1960 painting of an Arabian horse by Wesley Dennis is the standard for the breed. . . or at least, it used to be. I pictured the "Arab" (as little girls called them, thinking of them as the epitome of horsedom) as having a fine, sculpted head sitting on a swanlike but muscular neck. Large dark eyes and flaring nostrils were traits of this ancient desert breed, as were small, pricked ears.

This horse (the cinematic knockout Cass Ole), shown in silhouette in The Black Stallion, reveals ideal Arabian conformation in every sense. Especially that beautifully symmetrical head with its elegant profile.

Even as a horsy little girl, having read every horse book in existence, I knew there was a trait prized by Bedouin horsemen: it was called jibbah, and it referred to the slightly concave, tapering forehead and muzzle of the desert horse. SLIGHTLY, I said, as in the lovely Arabian mare above.

SO. . . WHAT HAPPENED???

This happened.

And this happened.

And THIS happened! AAAAACK!!! 

Somewhere along the line, in the past few decades, the standard of beauty and ideal conformation for the Arabian horse has gone to hell in a shit-basket.

The glorious and dignified desert steed has come to resemble something more like My Little Pony.

We now have a horse with a pig-snout: a muzzle that looks squeezed, with very large nostrils that have almost formed a mono-nostril (because there's simply no room for them at the end of that tiny nose), and black eyes that look something like an alien's. The show ring is behind a lot of this mutation/mutilation, with handlers applying eyeliner or even tattooing the horse's eyelids to give them that dark and sultry look.

But most of it is breeding. Bad breeding, to exaggerate traits that someone must have decided are quintessentially Arabian. The result is creatures which look disturbingly alike, like the Hapsburgs when their genetic house of cards finally collapsed. No one seems to see this ugliness any more, and horsy Facebook pages draw oooohs and ahhhhs in the comments section for the most horribly distorted photos of Arabians, their heads flung up unnaturally high and their eyes flashing because their handler just jerked the hell out of the lead.

BUT!!!

That's not why I'm writing this.

I'm writing this because the other day I came across this photo:

Hell-llo, I thought. In fact, I think I said it out loud.

It looked strange. It looked like the puzzle piece that might fit together with the grotesque Arabian "dished" face.

It wasn't just the exaggerated Roman nose, but the eyes, which had an exotic almond shape that gave the horse a "knowing" look. Unless we're talking about locating the feed bucket, most horses aren't particularly knowing.

It was eerie. What sort of horse was this?

It definitely wasn't a draft horse. It just didn't have the look of one. A Clydesdale or Percheron has the same sort of nose, but it belongs on a massive head and neck. This just looked strange.

When I looked it up, I was even more puzzled.

It's one of these.

An Andalusian  (and oh God, how I love that name! Say it again: Andalusian). It's a very ancient breed of Spanish horse, but a horse of a very different shape and size. You can instantly see that the neck is thicker, the body longer and more muscular than the Arabian's. The legs are more like a thoroughbred's. And the head is noble, with a curious convex curve that is the opposite of jibbah: what shall we call it - habbij? 

The Lusitano (another fall-over-backwards-gorgeous name) originated in Portugal, and a horse person would kill me for saying this, but they're pretty similar. So you have horses like this, magnificent steeds which resemble all those old paintings and sculptures of war horses. They're so different from Arabians - or even Morgans or Quarter horses or Saddlebreds or ANY of the breeds which originated from Arabian stock - that it's hard to know what to make of them. How did a saddle horse get a head like that?

But here's where we start to get in trouble. Something about this horse's head isn't quite right. He looks inbred to me - though, of course, a lot of highly-bred horses are. It comes with the territory. But that convex head is as weird-looking as the Hapsburg lip. The eyes are almost squinty. Could it be that the breed's more distinctive traits are being deliberately exaggerated, for the sake of the show ring and the auction block?

Is this what makes a Lusitano a Lusitano?

I hate to see it, because at their finest these are such beautiful horses. But this is not beautiful. This is deformity, not unlike the toy-like Arabians which have lost all their dignity through human manipulation. 

No more horse lies! "From the horse's mouth" means telling the truth. And these poor creatures, through no fault of their own, are paying through the nose.

Blogger's afterthought. It's sad, some of the things you see. There are zillions of YouTube videos of horses, including Arabians bucking and prancing around. They are beautiful to watch. Here's a tiny clip:

The resemblance to Cass Ole is just astounding, even in the way he moves. It's just possible the two are related. But what dismayed me were the comments:

"That's not an Arabian."

"No way, don't try to fool us."

"You trying pass this off as a Arab?"

"Look at the head, it's Quarter horse or a Morgan."

"Arab have deer head, not? This horse has no."

Yes. The "deer head" with the tiny squashed nose has now become the standard, so that a magnificent horse like this one is somehow "wrong".

My hope is that not all Arabians look like this. But the fact that ANY of them do dismays me, particularly since this sort of extreme breeding seems to be done to please the public.

I would be pleased by this. And thank you.

Animal hybrids: monsters in the making

I know, I realize I shouldn't get into these things, these creepy things, these creepy things that make my flesh crawl, these creepy things that make my flesh crawl and also make me realize that humanity has no idea what it's doing.

What awfuls me out about this short video isn't the mammoth size of this freak animal, nor even the casual way they putter around him in total denial that he could kill them with one swipe of his gigantic paw. No doubt they think he's "sweet", no doubt they think he's "tame", no doubt they call him one of their "babies" (an ever-present symptom of the malignant disease of keeping exotic animals as pets).

I want to write more about this whole mess later, when I get a chance to see a documentary called The Elephant in the Living Room. I saw the last half of it on National Geographic Channel and spent the half-hour with my mouth open.

The cases in this documentary weren't the worst, but they were bad enough. Keeping exotic animals as pets often goes completely unregulated, sometimes with disastrous results. It wasn't just the utter degradation of seeing glorious jungle animals kept in wire cages (with one male lion slowly, agonizingly electrocuted by faulty wiring on a freezer): it was the emotional abyss at the core of the people who were keeping these "babies". "He's like my son," claimed the lion's owner before the disaster,"one of my kids." Why is it I have this feeling his real children never tapped his heart in the same profound way?

All that unfathomable sickness aside, I soon got on to the topic of animal hybrids and was pretty astonished at what I found. Astonished, and freaked out. There has been an awful lot of tampering going on behind our backs: I didn't realize the well-known liger is three times the size of a normal lion, weighing close to a thousand pounds and resembling some prehistoric beast on an unimagineable scale. All this has been engineered, folks - we made it happen - and we made it happen without the slightest knowledge or concern that the resultant creature would be so grotesquely proportioned.

From the liger and the smaller tigon, often afflicted by dwarfism (not that such an insignificant thing will stop them from being bred), I fell into the dusky world of the wolf dog, which some people own for the same reason they'd get their bodies tattoed over every square inch: look, I'm a social rebel, I own a dog that's half-wolf! Look, I take a huge risk every time I take him out of the wire cage!

Does anyone stop to think what is going on in the mind and biology of an animal that has been created from spare parts, cobbled together in God-knows-what sort of way just on a human whim? Might there be some sort of internal conflict at the most fundamental level? Might that animal not know who he/she is? Or are those kinds of concerns not on the table, so long as we satisfy our "let's try this and see what happens" impulse?

Oh, but it got worse, a lot worse! Zebroids, including a zorse, a zonkey, and a zony. A cama, fusing together two species that are, well, close enough, aren't they? Except the llama genes seem to cancel out the camel's hump. But who needs a hump anyway?

When I came to the grolar or pizzly, I began to feel sick outright. But bears are bears, aren't they? Does it even matter if they're brown or white? Then why do I feel so nauseated? Never mind that these grotesque and ridiculous names insult their animal dignity and wouldn't even suit a toy. Hey, the leopon is just a spotty lion, right? And the wolphin. . .

I stop at the wolphin. I stop at the wolphin because I know whales and dolphins are so intelligent, and I honestly wonder what sort of genetic clash might make these sea geniuses go completely mad.


What set all this off - I mean, after the National Geographic documentary, which I have ordered on a DVD - was stumbling upon something that nearly made my hair stand on end: the humanzee. I didn't like to think that it was possible, that we've come that far, that we might just want to try this out for a lark or out of scientific curiosity: but haven't we been told over and over again how genetically close we are to chimps?  

This is a weird story that has been officially discounted, and now that I look at it a little more objectively I can see why. A couple claimed to have captured a baby chimp "in the wild" in 1960. Oliver had some pretty strange traits, the strangest being walking upright without the weird staggering gait of most chimps. He also had a strange-looking face, hairless and sort of flat, though hardly human. His ears creeped me out however, as they didn't look like chimp ears at all. They looked like human ears that had been grafted on.

Other chimps shunned Oliver, who seemed to prefer human company (and even mounted his owner's wife, causing them to eventually sell him). He smelled different, not like a normal chimp. These were all little question marks that added up to a very big one: did Oliver have human genes, and if so, how had this happened?

Back in 1960, the assumption was that some man had had sex with a female chimp "in the wild", the chimp had become pregnant, and little upright-walking, flat-faced Oliver was the result. He quickly became a sensation, dressed up in a tux and encouraged to smoke and drink for the crowd. This reflected the hilarity of the times upon witnessing animals "acting like humans". (Remember the Marquis Chimps on Ed Sullivan? I hope you don't.)

But a funny thing happened on the way to fame. People lost interest. The whole thing looked a little bogus. Oliver was sold again and again, each time falling a little deeper into the hole, and ending up in a small square wire cage in a laboratory.

Decades later, Oliver's original owner (perhaps wondering if there was more money to be made) tracked him down and eventually settled him into one of those chimp retirement homes. He didn't walk upright any more - too much trouble - and by this time he just looked like an old chimp, a very relieved old chimp, relieved he didn't have to wear a tux, smoke cigars and drink brandy for the crowd. He died only a couple of weeks ago, in fact, probably about 55 years old. Certainly he had served his time.

But it hangs in the air, doesn't it - weirdly, and sickeningly. Camas, pizzlys, zorses and wolphins. Why not humanzees? At the end of his life Oliver was genetically tested, and it was officially announced that he was "100% chimpanzee", so that was that. (If he hadn't been, what would they have said? The genie would be out of the bottle for sure.)  


But I had a funny feeling about it all. I had a funny feeling about it all because that was over 50 years ago. I had a funny feeling about it all because that was over 50 years ago and, by God, now it is not only possible but bloody well likely we could do such a thing, "cross" a chimp with a human and come up with a whole new sort of species.

At the embryonic level, this has already been attempted and perhaps even accomplished. We want stem cells and new organs and all that sort of thing, necessary spare parts salvaged from throwaways, and we don't seem to care how much we ravage the natural balance in order to get them.

But an actual humanzee, a hybrid? Is it illegal? Would it be funded? Who cares. Money comes. It follows curiosity. I am beginning to get this sick feeling, this prickly feeling that we're going to see this, and sooner than we think. The trouble is, no one will know what to do with this wretched thing, this product of strands of DNA twisted horribly wrong:  kill it now? Watch it suffer, or, perhaps worse, thrive?

What will it look like? Can you see it in your mind? Will it maybe resemble its human parent: "Doesn't little Johnny look just like his Dad"? Will it walk upright like Oliver, or scooch around on its knuckles and swing from the trees?  Talk, perhaps? Have thoughts, opinions, needs? But who cares about needs at a time like this: who thinks of needs except OUR needs, our whims, our wretched inability to leave things alone and appreciate a fragile, unforgiveably damaged wild world that is committing suicide right in front of our eyes.

 

Dear Sir or Madam, will you read my book

    It took me years to write, will you take a look

Order The Glass Character from:

Amazon
http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B001K7NGDA

Barnes & Noble

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-glass-character-margaret-gunning/1117863913?ean=9781927068885

Thistledown Press

http://www.thistledownpress.com/html/search/genre/Fiction/the_glass_character_p580.cfm

Chapters/Indigo
http://www.chapters.indigo.ca/books/the-glass-character/9781927068885-item.html?ikwid=the%

Today I am three

Can there be anything more idyllic, more innocent, more knowing than a three-year-old girl?

How about a three-year-old who is somehow, mysteriously, tied to you through blood and bone. How she came through me is a mystery, but it's a fact that without me, she would not exist.

When life gets me down, which it often does, I ponder this mystery: we all come out of nothing. Or seemingly nothing. All of Creation started with a void - it had to - and somehow ended up this teeming mess, this singing intricacy, overrun by crass humans but somehow still spellbindingly beautiful.

Two people meet, and sometimes nothing happens. End of story. Or they meet, and in the course of things, become sexually attracted to each other.

Sometimes it ends there.

But sometimes, when the act is unimpeded, a quarter-teaspoon of fluid, innocuous as spit, finds its way to a microscopic dot.

Result: a new human being, an individual the likes of which has never been seen before (and will never be seen again) in human history.

God creates each person once, then breaks the mould.

I search in Lauren's beaming three-year-old face for some trace of me, and I can't find it. None of my four grandkids look like me (see lovely brown-eyed Caitlin, above, with Grandma).

All strongly resemble the other side of the family. Except.

Except for Lauren's intensity, the way she comes at life full-throttle, six-guns blazing. In this, she does resemble me, but puts me to shame (but if I hadn't been squashed so flat as a child, so written off as worthless, perhaps I would have been the same way).

Perhaps this is my second chance. This echo generation, saving me. And saving the world from its awful lack-of-Laurenness.

Out of nothing, or seemingly nothing, out of a single act (an odd one, when you really think about it), "someone" comes into the world. Lauren has changed the world just by being in it; her valour and rambunctious humour in the face of juvenile diabetes (diagnosed at only 15 months) has been remarkable, an example.

All hail Lauren, only three, but capable of restoring my soul.