10/06/2025
This horse didn’t need to die. Most don’t. Occasionally the universe will throw you an underhand slow-pitch like a bone sticking out of the skin or the wailing eye of a full twist colic, but more often than not we schedule their exits. And we decide why. Even these instances when the decision is “easy” may yet be fool’s gold: Trading their real suffering for a reduction in our own which may not be made of whole cloth.
We killed 4 in 5 months at our place this year and that’s a lot more than usual. The alarming frequency allowed me to notice myself playing out a well established pattern around these interactions: It was never hard to attend these beings as they left this plane. The difficulty began after the flowers had been spread around the broken body and the forelock had been harvested: when I felt the need to concoct the palatable story for the surviving humans.
It’s not quite the same as when you tell someone that you’ve experienced a human death. They still don’t ask about you right away, they tend to want for “what happened?”. In this case I believe people are trying to figure out if what killed this other person factors into their list of “things they should be afraid might kill them” especially if the death was whatever they might consider to be untimely. In the case of a horse, because we usually take a much more active role in the ending of the life, the need for a palatable explanation is different. In these cases I think we are usually trying to evaluate what we would have done in the horse-killer’s position in order to decide how we should feel about the outcome. A brilliant piece of cultural subterfuge to keep us of the scent.
The rub arrived for me when the tasteful narrative for why one of the horses was best off dead was not falling so easily to hand. Again, helping this horse leave this earth felt completely peaceful, but why did it feel less “clean” than the others? As I became increasingly weary of trying to explain the circumstances to related parties, I realized the true source of my discomfort: The unpalatable explanation for this horse’s death was made from the exact same rotten material as the story I had told myself and others about my horses. Only my story made me the reluctant hero rather than whatever else a person can be and my friends helped me keep up that facade.
My story went something like this: I have given this horse everything I am capable of and it is not thriving. I’m going to have this horse killed, but in doing so I will free up the resources that are presently being invested in him and make room for another horse who is in need of what we can provide and thereby create the potential for a horse to thrive in this one’s absence.
See. I’m the good guy. So why does it feel pretty much exactly the same as “yeah this horse is fine, but in a few years might start to break down and nobody including me wants to pay to feed it.”? Because in both cases if I put myself in the horse’s position I probably wouldn’t like it too much and that’s the ticket to the real trouble. No matter how you slice it, each of us had been able to determine a finite amount of money or other resources this life was “worth” to us. If we can do this so naturally only having to cross the moral “t’s” and dot the socially acceptable “i”s, it becomes disturbingly obvious how easily the same rhetoric could be applied to ourselves.
If someone told me today that they could “see my future, and that I probably wouldn’t make my full life expectancy and certainly wouldn’t do it all the way healthy, but what they could do is: kill me today, and take all the resources that would have been invested in me for the rest of my life and put it towards a crop of kids who might have a great life”. I can’t say I’d gladly take the long walk. And why not? Isn’t more life better? Isn’t thriving better than just existing? Makes sense on paper, why don’t I want to die for it?
Like many of us, I was indoctrinated from a young age with the dangerous, corrosive belief that not only do I have ownership of my life, but that my life has “Value”. I believe this abhorrent aberration is only available to human consciousness and is the source of nearly all of our fabricated misery. The word “Value” is inherently born on comparison. As soon as I acknowledge that my life has any, I can now compare it to anything else. My culture of origin will quickly inform me of which lives have more or less “value” as some can be bought with currency, others held in the highest esteem or disregarded completely. More importantly, my fear of dying is most likely just the fear of not redeeming all of my life’s promised “value”. If I were to be killed “early” surely I would have missed out on a portion of my deeded allotment. If life has value, then more is better. However, life can also lose value if it is not returning enough on investment. They call this “quality of life”. Some amounts of life are worth more if they are paying more interest but it’s not a fixed rate. I have gone through my whole existence feeling like I have something to lose that must be protected. The irony is, it can’t really be taken, but it probably can be foolishly squandered.
I am now grappling daily with the inescapable logic of the fact that my life inherently has no “value”. The question of whether or not I “own” it is rather immaterial once it is rendered worthless. Everything that is, was, or will be was lighter or heavier than an ounce, and longer or shorter than a foot. In a universe without measurement were all things somehow truly “equal”? Perhaps, and a very tough concept to get ahold of for a being who’s very existence in this world was codified with the customary announcement of pounds and inches. We are so clearly all cogs in a machine larger than all of our collective reckoning. Cells in a much bigger organism playing out a role that could never been known from the street level.
For me, this is not a nihilistic license to kill indiscriminately, nor to idly pass my valueless days. To the contrary, in the absence of value, I prefer to consider my life and that of other beings to be precious. Something can be precious without comparison of any kind and without any feeling of ownership or entitlement, should be able to come and go without sorrow. Every rainbow I see might be the last one but I still can’t ask it to stay. A precious thing/being/moment can be appreciated, but not provide any tangible value at all. Furthermore, a thing need not be rare to be precious. Diamonds are incredible common, and were just as beautiful before fabricated scarcity made them more “valuable”. Life is not precious because it is rare or fragile, it is neither of those things.
But I will still kill horses from time to time. So how will I guide when and why? While I have been kicking these ideas around, I have found myself troubled by a passage in a buddhist text I had been enjoying. The teacher spoke of the great karmic favor of “ransoming the lives of captive animals bound for slaughter and setting them free”. I worried that I might incurring truly massive cosmic debt by not only refusing to keep limitless numbers of ailing horses, but also by undertaking the ending of their lives personally. But I thought of the moments when I had been with them as they left, and it felt completely fine. Powerful, fascinating maybe, but fine. In the gravity well of those moments, surely I could trust my heart to tell me if what was occurring was cosmically detrimental.
As I thought more about that teacher’s recommendation, I considered that even in the time when it was written, several hundred years ago, a herd of captive domestic animals turned loose in the wilderness were hardly all “given their lives”. Same as our horses today those fat, naive, animals would have been immediately set upon by all kinds of predators while many others quickly found themselves unsuitably evolved for the terrain they now faced. I think the important difference could be that their lives were no longer measured by their “value”. They would not be killed for someone’s meaningless “profit”. Even if their death was not to be avoided, it would be a precious life, with a precious end, their body nourishing the lives of many others.
To interpret the relationship I have with the modern horse in these terms, I have to consider that there is nowhere to turn them loose. They are part of the nature humans have created and their highly modified bodies bare minimal resemblance to the last of their kind to be truly “wild” animals. They must now make their way in the theoretical topography of what could be considered the aftermath of their extinction event. Some will find the fertile protected valley of the horse sanctuary, but most will not. It is part of the duty of nature to move life along. Humans are new at playing so many parts in its operation. In the absence of predators and famine, if I have to take up the mantle of killing horses who can’t make it in what serves for nature now, so be it. I do not undertake it lightly and it is my honor to witness their transition with as little human baggage present as I can. I will trust that I am part of a grander plan and that my heart knows when it’s time to play that part. One of our horses we killed minutes after diagnosis. Another we let linger in the pasture for another year. Both felt like the right time.
Next time I say goodbye to a precious being I hope to remind myself what these horses allowed me to learn and to release myself of any feeling of obligation to pacify any other human’s desire for comfort. I want to cry for the loss of a dear friend and the fading of part of myself that lived within them without the call for morality to rob pain of its innocence. Very few beings “need” to die, even fewer want to, but horses are way better at it than we are. Or, at least, they don’t spend nearly so much of their precious lives thinking about it.
-Zak
