Tag Archives: War Horse

Jan7

war horse

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I went to see the film War Horse last night.  In a blog following the horse slaughter debacle, I had expressed a hope that millions would see the movie and be moved to act on behalf of the horse.  Sadly, I don’t think this movie will do it.

I had seen the play several months ago. There is something infinitely more moving about the relationship of horse to human in the theatrical production.  Not just the relationships between the human actors and the horses, but also the breathing animation of human bodies inside the horses, creating each of the subtle equine articulations of these marvelous puppets.  The horses feel more fully there because of the intricate, detailed attention to how they move, breath, respond.

And the play does more to engage us in the horror of this war that took the lives of 8 million horses and 35 million humans.

The horses in the film are beautiful, no question.  But there is something stomach turning about seeing a real horse run though “no man’s land” becoming hideously entangled in barbed wire. Here I would have to agree with Kat Murphy:

Maybe the puppets used in the Broadway play eloquently expressed the horror of beautiful, dumb beasts brutally done to death, even more expendable than the millions of young men wasted in WWI. And perhaps a puppet Joey racing across no-man’s-land, mad with terror, to fall tangled in barbed wire worked as shattering metaphor for the nightmare of war. But movies can be cruelly literal; it’s living horseflesh we see beaten, maimed, dying in Spielberg’s endless outtake from “All Quiet on the Western Front.” There’s no masking the smell of slaughterhouse.

But hey, in the very next scene after Joey’s gut-wrenching steeplechase, enemy soldiers join forces to cut him out of the barbed wire, cracking wise and milking the moment, as hushed as church, for every drop of schmaltz — served up on Joey’s bloody back. Trust corn to take away the sting. That corn, followed by a prolonged, self-indulgent descent into bathos, turns the suffering of an animal into a cinematic lie (the exact opposite of the sanctification of the battered donkey in Robert Bresson‘s “Au hasard, Balthazar“). That lie feels like the callousness of a child, unable to grasp what pain and death mean to other living things.

 The difference for me is between feeling manipulated versus awed and moved.

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Dec6

horses and humanity

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“If we see cruelty or wrong that we have the power to stop, and do nothing, we make ourselves sharers in the guilt.”  (Black Beauty by Anna Sewell)

Pam White posted a beautiful blog yesterday.  It has inspired me to look at the horse slaughter issue through the lens of the words of Chief Seattle.

This is a video of Joseph Campbell reading from Chief Seattle’s letter of 1854.  To me, this is sacred text.  And, it is no mistake that the horse is featured so clearly in the mythologizing of our land.

The ASPCA opposes horse slaughter.  PETA has adopted an odd position that decries slaughter of any kind, but approves the slaughter of horses in the U.S. as a way of keeping horses from being shipped to Canada or Mexico for their grotesque deaths.  I don’t think you can have it both ways.   Watch this video only if you have a strong stomach. 

Slaughter is never, never humane.  Euthanasia is humane.  If Congress is actually concerned about the welfare of our horses, they should make a provision for humane euthanasia by a veterinarian.  But in fact, this is another issue driven by greed and other countries’  appetites for horse meat.  And greed is never compassionate; it is crude and expeditious.

As I said yesterday, in the burgeoning storm about horses and slaughter, there is this:  horses possess an extraordinary  sensitivity.  They are defenseless.  They are companion animals, like dogs and cats.

I am weighing in on this because I spend time every day with horses.  This is not an abstract issue for me.  I write every day about how horses can help us to become better humans:  more aware, more embodied, more conscious.  It is their gift as prey animals who have played and continue to play a major role in our civilization as workers (in war, in the fields, on the streets), entertainers (the racing industry)  and partners in sport, work and life.

The pro-slaughter lobby says that the horse issue has been hijacked by emotional arguments on the part of opponents of slaughter.  And what, I ask, is wrong with emotion, with feeling?  (Do I smell an old sexist argument here?)

Here is my hope:  That millions and millions of people will see the film War Horse, and get, viscerally, something heart-opening about the horse.  I am doing what  Abraham suggests:  pivoting from something I abhor  (horse slaughter and its inevitable cruelty) to point myself toward what I want:  a shift in public consciousness and policy.

More reading:  http://www.manesandtailsorganization.org/vicki_tobin.html