Article Contributed on: 1/29/2007 4:05:52 PM
Ladies and gentlemen - in prime horse racing fashion after months of agonizing wait,
Barbaro is finally dead. Just as the Kentucky Derby takes 10 hours of pre-broadcast for a 20-minute race, Barbaro needed eight months of tests, operations and drugs before he would inevitably die.
Hallelujah! Now don't get me wrong I love animals and still try to help out the Denver Dumb Friends League (Who are against horse racing) any way I can.
But the thing that irks me the most is the country's outcry and support of this four-legged legend. So he was one of the greatest racing horses in recent history. But he was just that, a racing horse.
So when he went down on that fateful day where he shattered his right hind leg just a few strides into the Preakness Stakes, the nation held its breath, and in the weeks that followed countless gifts, wishes, and prayers flew to Barbaro and his owners, just as countless uninsured children sit in agony in hospital waiting rooms to be treated for their various forms of cancer and leukemia.
So I ask you was it worth it? What did the nation gain by worshiping this golden calf ... I mean horse? (I mean blasphemy) Would all the money poured into trying to save Barbaro really do more good in treating him or would it just be beating a dead horse to quote the saying.
Couldn't countless prayers, support, and donations be more appropriate for some little girl who is barely holding on fighting some serious disease where her parents can't afford the medical support required?
Instead of performing surgery after countless surgery on tendons in an animal whose past genealogy either went out to pasture or to the glue factory, why not highlight the fight some humans have with breast cancer or Leukemia where families get broken apart and children lose parents and parents lose children.
Instead of a nation losing a horse where in ten years they will be forgotten and replaced by some new up-and-coming colt.
I doubt the parents who lost their daughter to Parkinson's will forget her after ten years.
Brad Bettag is a student at the Colorado School of Mines.