So, Barbaro is continuing to recover from his injury, in the care of the University of Pennsylvania's Vet school. Who, very appropriately, are raking in the $$$ in donations based on their excellent care of him. His updates are easily accessible on the web, and they've established a little app through which people can send Barbaro get-well emails.
Of course I have sent my messages to Barbaro, and I've been checking his message board (all the messages sent in by everyone else) regularly. I expected that my messages would be mixed in with millions of others, all from 12 year old girls. Because, well, who else would send a horse an email message? Right?
Wrong! So, I'm 42 years old, and it turns out I'm one of the youngsters on the message board. Here's a little demographic breakdown of the messages that were visible yesterday. There were 78 messages, all had been sent that day or one day previous, that included the sender's name and age.
Overall, the average age of a sender was 48 years.
Only 7 of the senders were younger than 20.
The oldest of the senders was 77, the youngest was 8.
64 of the 78 senders were women. This is the only part of the deal that I thought was totally predictable. Average age of a female sender = 48, average age of a male sender = 46.
Really, really, weird. Maybe little 12 year old girls aren't going through that horsey stage anymore? Or maybe nobody under 40 watches the triple crown races? I don't know. I would bet you that at least 90% of those posting messages to Barbaro were watching when Ruffian (undefeated filly) broke her leg in the match race against Foolish Pleasure (Kentucky Derby winning colt) back in the 70s (remember battle of the sexes matches?). Ruffian had to be put down - and I recently learned from the UPenn vet site that this is what happened to Ruffian.
She underwent a successful surgery to repair the leg she broke in the race. However, when she was coming out of anesthesia, she begain to flail about (as apparently horses often do) and ended up re-breaking that leg and another. Which is why now they float horses in a pool when they're coming out of anesthesia - they can flail and flail, and they won't re-injure themselves. Barbaro profited directly from Ruffian's experience - and here's the proof!
2 comments:
Hey. I am 14 years old and just wanted to inform you that I am a huge fan of horse racing, Ruffian, and Barbaro. Although I have never actually experienced first hand the sight of Ruffian's incredible speed, I have watched videos of her running on youtube. As soon as I saw Barbaro break down in the Preakness, I was reminded of the tragety (sp) that happened a little bit over 30 years ago. It is ashame that racing world had to lose two incredible horses over almost the same injury. Two incredible, undefeated horses had to be put down. Although I love racing and the thrill of it and hope to be a jockey someday, I believe it is very dangerous and the footing needs to be changed and replaced every year or two. It's really a great shame to lose incredible horses over injuries that could hopefully be resolved. On the other hand, it seems impossible to prevent the death of a race horse who has fractured his or her leg.
I thought the same thing when Barbaro went down. I wasn't able to see it, but from what I heard, it was horrible. I watched two movies this weekened, one of Ruffian, and the horrible way she killed her hoof, and how she thought she was still running, and then she was put down. That was so sad. And I was so happy one day, and next thing I know, he was put down too. I saw a movie about Barbaro too. He was quite the colt alright. I hate hearing, 'put to sleep' to me, it's killin'. Give the animal a chance, you would do that to a human, you wouldn't just give up just after the injury happened, like most horses. I do also hope one day they'll think about that and try harder, and Barbaro could still be alive today.
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