Posts tagged horses
Grand National
I’ve supported the Grand National for years. I love horses and I love the steeplechasers, I know that they are well looked after and I respect the fact that they’re not babies like the flat racehorses are but I honestly can’t watch the Grand National any more. My reason has nothing to do with racing in general, it’s the fact that the way the race is organised doesn’t seem to respect the lives of horses any more. I’ve worked in Equestrian sport for several years and I know that if so many horses died in any other horse event that there would immediately be an enquiry and everyone would be outraged. In the Grand National however, it seems that everyone in the racing industry accepts that horses are going to die every time the race is run. I just don’t think I can accept that any more. You would never have that happen in an Olympic equestrian event where horses are expected to jump fences that are just as high and wide if not bigger. Something needs to be done. Surely horses don’t need to die to prove that they are talented or outstanding. There will always be accidents but I’m tired of watching horses and riders tumbling at every fence. This is not sport any more.
The Pictish standing stone at Aberlemno kirk yard, in Angus, Scotland, depicts the battle of Nectansmere in 685AD.
Wow, I think I’m going to have to go see this.
A fragment of an Assyrian 9th-century BC carved limestone relief from Nimrud, Iraq.
A celebration of the horse – from newly excavated Saudi Arabian rock carvings to Victorian London’s dung dilemma
The British Museum is planning its first exhibition devoted to the horse, with a display tracing the animal’s story across thousands of years of human history. …
… The wild horse was domesticated at least 5,000 years ago and probably far earlier, initially for meat and later for transport, transforming how far a man could travel and how much he could carry. The exhibition traces the evolution of the elegant, swift Arabian horses, associated in legend with King Solomon and Muhammad. Said to have been created by angels or born out of the wind, they were prized more highly than gold, and made suitable gifts for princes and emperors.
Their distinctive, high-arched necks and tails can be seen in Assyrian sculptures, Egyptian wall paintings and ancient Greek vases, and the exhibition will also trace the bloodlines of all modern thoroughbreds back to three famous Arabian stallions imported into 18th-century England: the Darley Arabian, the Byerly Turk and the Godolphin Arabian.
Curtis, whose career as an archaeologist has been devoted to the ancient near east, can testify to their speed: when he turned back from a site visit in Iran and his horse sensed he was homeward bound, it bolted, leaving him clinging to its mane. Loans from the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge will trace the history of the Crabbet Arabian Stud, complete with a bedouin tent for entertaining visitors, at Crabbet Park in West Sussex, where the writer and diplomat Wilfrid Scawen Blunt and his wife, Anne – granddaughter of the poet Byron – imported and bred Arabian horses, eventually dividing the collection when his string of mistresses led to their separation.
The free exhibition, which will open in May, has been timed to coincide with the Olympic Games, but has also been conceived as a diamond jubilee gift to another celebrated horse breeder, the Queen.
(via British Museum canters through 5,000 years of equine history | Culture | The Guardian)
5 notes (via merelygifted)
