Quote:
|
Originally Posted by IrishofNDMan
While sitting in class today, I started to day dream and think about horse racing. I started to think about recent races that I watched, and just wondered to myself, "what drives these animals to want to run, and to want to run faster than the other?" What makes them want to win a race, are they truly competitors. Then I started to think, do some horses actually have rivals, and do they know when they are going up against them in a race? Might sound like a stupid question, but your thoughts please.
|
Oh believe me, some horses are competitiors through and through, just like people. They desire to go faster than all of the other horses. Even the colts and fillies that play in the pastures compete and race against each other. It is a driving desire, an instinct that goes back to ancestral times in which horses always wanted to be faster than the others because they were animals of prey and the last one (running in the back of the herd) was usually the one that got eaten.
Also, I believe that horses who consistently run against the same horses know who their rivals are because each horse has a different smell, and a horse's sense of smell is very keen. Although, it didn't matter with a horse such as Tiznow because he knew that all of the other horses were his rivals, and he would gut it out to the wire. My favorite race call of all time, "And Tiznow wins it for America!"