They shoot horses, don’t they?

Today the on-line news services had a great deal to say about Kentucky Derby winner Barbaro’s accident at the Preakness Stakes. The photograph of Barbaro nobly pursuing the race with a broken hind leg jutting out spoke a great deal about not giving up on the goal of a lifetime—to win the triple crown. Today’s New York Times had a short article by Jane Schwartz, “We Care, But Why Do We Care So Much?”, (Here) about Barbaro. But, after reading her short story (the author wrote a book on another famous race horse, Ruffian, who was euthanized after a debilitating racetrack accident back in the mid 1970s), I came to realize she was addressing much more than a noble horse and a great jockey trying to save his horse. She was really writing about all of us in the human family and the cares and concerns that we may harbor.

Ms. Schwartz asks early on an important question about Barbaro’s racing accident: “Why do people care so much about the fate of an animal to which they have no personal connection?” Perhaps her question could be simplified by dropping the phrase “to which they have no personal connection?” She goes on, though, to answer, in a way, her question: it breaks the hearts of people when animals have to be destroyed.

Ms Schwartz is thinking beyond the Preakness Stakes incident and aftermath because she begins to introduce the real question: what if it, the horse, were a human being? She notes that good, meaning famous, horses “are treated the way every child should be treated…” The emphasis is mine. But we should pause and ask ourselves the question: how are children, how are people, in reality treated? Does it depend if they are famous or not like Barbaro? The author also notes that there seems to be a social pressure not to destroy the animal “even when that may be the most humane path.”

A few years ago I found myself on the periphery of a controversy involving the applications of several student groups that were seeking recognition by the student government so that they could qualify for campus funding and other university benefits. One group was “Law Students for Choice.” The University administration correctly stepped in and noted that it would be a problem for the institution which asserts a Catholic identity to recognize this group as a qualifying student organization. In response, some members of the university community then began to raise questions about a student pro-life group that was also seeking recognition around the same time. I don’t believe the latter group ever got by the student government board. Oddly enough, the Animal Rights group made it through to the finish line, so to speak, and on to become a recognized student group.

To go back to Ms. Schwartz’s remark that there seems to be social pressure against killing animals: it is harder to make the same claim on behalf of human beings in many contexts. Be the topic abortion, embryonic cloning, euthanasia, Darfur, or black market sale of human organs, does our society, do we, express the same caring for people as we seem to convey for animals?

And that is where we who are educators asserting the role of Catholic legal theory have a role to play. Ms. Schwartz concludes her essay by talking about miracles of famous race horses recovering from tragic accidents. Her last line is about what she identifies as the “real miracle” because so many people “are still capable of caring so much.” But, I ask, do they care about people as much as animals? If it is good to hope for animals, famous or not, is it also not a good to hope for people, be they famous or not? The answer to that question must be yes. But our culture, which is quick to display its empathy for a famous animal, does not always respond in a similar fashion when even one person, let alone thousands or millions, is forgotten by the same culture.

That is where educators concerned about Catholic legal theory have a crucial role to play—a role so crucial that it, too, could be the goal of a lifetime. There is something about educating inquiring minds (be they students, readers of articles, judges, legislators, administrators, and citizens with whom we come into contact) concerning the inestimable value of every human being whose future, both in this world and the next, should not be fraught with decisions and attitudes that many would find barbaric if they were directed toward a horse. I am sorry for Barbaro, and I am sorry for Ruffian, the famous horse that is the subject of Ms. Schwartz’s book to which I made previous reference. But I am far more sorry for those children, born and not; those mature men and women struggling with the problems and conflicts of life; those aging elders left alone to die; those disabled persons who do not seem to exist, all who are viewed by a culture and its political and legal institutions as being dispensable because they are not famous—and if they are not famous, then they are unknown. And it becomes easy to imagine that they do not exist. That is the challenge for us: to demonstrate that they do exist and merit the primary concern of a people that are “capable of caring so much.” God has expressed his love for them. Might we not do the same if we are capable of caring so much? Surely the New York Times is not the only venue in which such caring can be displayed.    RJA sj