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Epilogue
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
EPILOGUE In explicit contrast to the North American emphasis on speed and uniformity, racing professionals in the United Kingdom regard their racing as the most authentic in the world, the closest to the sport that took place between royalty and the aristocracy on Newmarket Heath in the seventeenth century. Nevertheless, the kind of racing that takes place at Newmarket today is significantly different from the longdistance heat races that took place there in the seventeenth century. It is much more similar to the multiple-runner races over shorter distances that began to dominate in the nineteenth century. This did not prevent my informants from invoking James I and Charles II as role models, as did one Newmarket trainer who told me, ‘‘If it was good enough for the Merry Monarch, then it’s good enough for me. This place is intended for one thing and one thing only and has been for hundreds of years. Racing Thoroughbred horses. It’s in our blood, in the blood of the horses, and in the air itself. It’s impossible to imagine any other business here than the business of making racing.’’ The similarities between racing and breeding in the US and in the UK are as striking as the differences. Both use Thoroughbred racehorses, bred in accordance with ideas that are common to both nations, and in both places racing involves a group of professionals who share similar values. Both continue to engage with the idea of the Thoroughbred as an animal that naturally embodies certain traits that set it apart from all others. These traits are distributed throughout the breed via the mechanism of heredity. The content of this idiom varies through time and space but preserves certain perpetual concerns: the relative contributions of male and female, prepotency, and the origins of brilliance. 168 h o r s e p e o p l e The Thoroughbred was particularly well suited to expressing the new relationship between nature and society that was emerging in England in the eighteenth century. The General Stud Book (GSB) is regarded as the first studbook of any breed of any species, and it enshrined the modernist idea of progress, as well as protecting the market for purebred horses and offering opportunities for wealth creation through their exchange. It celebrated the idea of purity of lineage and provided a basis for the discussion of miscegenation, pollution, and corruption in terms that reflected the existing arrangements between classes and genders. Studbooks, breeding treatises, apprenticeships, family businesses, websites, public companies, international committees: the Thoroughbred has created extensive institutionalized interests as an object of knowledge. The GSB delineated the breed, and the breeding manuals that followed offered competing visions of its future and of distinctions within the breed. Horsemen and horsewomen put these theories into action, on the stud farm, at the auction, and on the racetrack, occasionally feeding back into the process, converting their embodied knowledge into books and pamphlets . This literature developed some distance away from mainstream veterinary knowledge and in close proximity to early eugenic tracts. The swift dismissal of eugenics by the scientific community in the aftermath of World War II was not reproduced in the world of Thoroughbred breeding. The status of the Thoroughbred and the potential social and financial rewards of unlocking the secret of its production have encouraged many attempts to ‘‘crack the code’’ of pedigree. The laborious calculations of Bruce Lowe, Colonel Vuillier, and Steve Roman all reveal a determination to reduce the apparently unfathomable and unrepeatable successes of particular combinations of animals to a simple formula. The energy and optimism of these approaches commands respect; their tortured equations and the vast reams of names and relationships they generate are a kind of poetry, a grammatical representation of the workings (and undoing) of particular breeding theories. These calculations continue to inform the decisions of breeders, despite their inconsistency and a disregard for current knowledge about fertility and heredity, including at the level of genetics. Participants in the social practice of breedingracehorsesarecapableofabsorbingnewinsightsfrombiomedicineandveterinary research and recasting their findings in terms with which they are comfortable. In addition to the academic study of pedigree, Thoroughbreds can also be known through their bodies. Living racehorses embody infinite combinations of physical and mental attributes. This is how many racing professionals prefer to know them. The physical assessment of a horse involves more than just the arrangement of its body parts relative to its breeding. It also involves an act of communion. The vision...