Barbaro, the glorious thoroughbred who won the Kentucky Derby, lost his Triple Crown hopes, and very nearly his life, when he broke down in the Preakness.

* Barbaro, the glorious thoroughbred who won the Kentucky Derby, lost his Triple Crown hopes, and very nearly his life, when he broke down in the Preakness. Medics managed to repair his leg sufficiently that he can stand, walk, and, most important, perform the duties of a stud. If he were not a Derby winner, he would have been put down on the track, as many thoroughbreds are every year. Racehorses are bred for lightness of bone, to increase their speed. Over time, they have become more fragile, and more prone to accidents. Advocates of animal rights will point to this as another baleful human intervention in the natural world. The logical endpoint of this criticism, however, is that we should have nothing to do with animals at all: no hunting, meat-eating, leather, or fur, for sure, but also no domestication, whether of horses, dairy cows, or pets. Since man denatures all he touches, we must withdraw from the natural world, and let its beautiful (and murderous) denizens breed, live, kill, and die by themselves, in preserves. The price of this secularized Buddhism would be to pen homo sapiens in a shrunken world.