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I don't understand something. Actually, I guess it would be fair to say I don't understand a lot of things, but in this particular instance I'm thinking of one thing specifically.
I'm not really a fighter, never have been. I learned at an early age that a fight, even a winning fight in the unlikely event I ever had one, would be ugly and painful. The ugly thing I can live with,but I've made it a building block in the foundation of my philosophy on life to try to avoid unnecessary pain whenever possible, especially pain of a physical nature.
So, deciding to avoid physical confrontations whenever possible was an easy choice for me, one I made at an early age. I was always on the far left in my class pictures in school, the ones where they line you up by height, and I've always been more scrawny than brawny, although I've always preferred to picture myself as wiry and built for speed.
But when I was consistently beaten by my sister whenever we got into scraps as children, I came to the obvious and inevitable conclusion that physically forcing people to see things my way was not usually going to result in a favorable conclusion for me, avoiding-painwise. So perhaps the thing I don't understand is caused by my relative lack of experience in physical confrontation.
Thanks for staying with me, if in fact you're still here. This is what I don't get. Is there any circumstance that would cause someone to intentionally head-butt a horse? Because that is what a jockey named Paul O'Neill did in London before a race Sunday.
Now, I'm not here to try to convince anyone that cruelty to animals is permissible, because I don't believe it is. And I'm more than happy to admit I don't know the first thing about horses and how to get them to do what you want, because I've spent virtually no time around them.
But does it seem like a good idea to you to take an animal, especially one that weighs probably twenty times as much as you do and could stomp you into the turf without even breathing hard, and is being unruly to boot, and provoke it with a head-butt? I watched the video of jockey O'Neill, who by the way is small and skinny (wiry?) and even I could beat up, and he clearly and intentionally pulls the horse close to him then butts it in the snout with his head.
O'Neill is wearing his helmet when he does it, thereby proving he is at least not totally off his rocker, but again: Horse = +-2000 pounds. O'Neill = +- 120 pounds. Speaking as someone who has long experience in trying to avoid physical pain, I think it's safe to say those are not great odds.
Although in this instance the horse, whose name is "City Affair," chose not to stomp Paul O'Neill into the turf without breathing hard, he also proved unmotivated by the incident, as he came in fourth in the race following the head-butt. For his part, O'Neill wasn't satisfied with simply head-butting his vehicle, he was given a caution by track stewards for his over-enthusiastic use of his whip during the race.
Being a little, tiny guy with anger-management issues doesn't seem to me to be a recipe for successful pain-avoidance. I wonder how it has worked for Paul O'Neill. I also can't help but wonder if City Affair goes to sleep at night and dreams of doing a tango on little Paul O'Neill's head, helmet or no helmet.