Homestretch

Tonight, 8.00, Setanta Ireland

The horse King's Honor seemed to have every chance of making it to the top. From a lineage point of view his blood was as blue as you could wish for, being sired by A.P. Indy, a winner of the Belmont Stakes, and coming from the same mare that produced the outstanding filly Lady Secret by way of Secretariat. There was one small problem though.

King's Honor couldn't run a lick. By way of comparison, Atletico Madrid's outstanding forward Sergio Agüero is having a child with Diego Maradona's daughter – imagine if that kid grows up to be pathologically afraid of spherical shapes and has an allergy to grass and you're in the same neck of the woods.

Having started out at the princely courses in Southern California, King's Honor was quickly moved off-Broadway to the Northern California tracks. When we meet him in Homestretch he has been reduced to running in races that roughly equate to Junior B hurling, at sleepy rundown venues like Grants Pass in Oregon. His owners, Susan and Dennis Hurley, have a stable of around 25 horses that they run at such venues with purses on offer in the region of $1,000. The maths is simple. If the horse wins enough to pay for his upkeep he stays around, but if he doesn't there's nowhere lower on the racing chain for him to go. Basically he's racing for his life.

Sheri Bylander's documentary deals exclusively with America but you'd have to assume that similar problems occur everywhere. Over 91,000 horses were slaughtered in America last year and after a brief explanation of how many, or indeed most, horses fall through the cracks of top-flight racing we are taken to a slaughter auction. Here horses are shoved around in abysmal conditions at what is a last-chance saloon, where the lucky ones get bought by a family on the search for a pony, and the unlucky ones get a bolt gun fired into their skulls.

At this point you're expecting an extended diatribe about cruelty to animals but Bylander comes up with something far more subtle and moving. Some of the horses from slaughter auctions are saved to go to retirement homes that are attached to prisons, where long-term inmates tend to them as part of a work scheme.

At Wallkill prison (charming name) in New York one inmate releases a newly-arrived horse from the lorry into a large paddock and is highly amused by the joy the horse takes in her new-found freedom. "It's like she just made parole," he says wistfully, before launching into an angry speech about the atrocious condition that some of the horses reach him in. His righteous anger is given a curious context when we discover he himself has been imprisoned for murder.

Most of the men working on the farms are in for violent or serious crimes and have spent a large chunk of their lives in captivity. They seem to sense kindred spirits in the highly-strung thoroughbreds around them, equating the manner in which the horses have been discarded by their owners to the way that they feel society has discarded them. The inmates regularly talk about the horses in such a way that you feel they are actually describing themselves, spouting homilies like "Everybody deserves a second chance," or "He just needed some love and understanding."

While all that might sound a little like The Shawshank Redemption with added horses, things never get too saccharine.

One sequence has the inmates explaining how they found themselves in prison, and while some tell their stories of drug dealing, police shoot-outs and murders with a sad acceptance, others are still fired by a sense of injustice that their lives were taken from them for what they see as a momentary lapse (one constantly refers to "the man I was forced to kill" in his tale).

Another inmate, 67 year-old Efrain Silva, has served 23 years of a life sentence for second-degree murder but whatever anger was in him seems to have long died and been replaced by a deep sadness. He explains how he missed his mother's funeral and his kids growing up, but the horses seem to act as a surrogate family for him. He gets frustrated when he can't articulate how much they mean to him but when one of the horses with which he has developed a particularly strong bond dies, he turns up on his day off to say goodbye and bury his friend. That famous Winston Churchill quote even turns up, "There's something about the outside of a horse that's good for the inside of a man."

Bylander doesn't try to beat us over the head with her message but one thing becomes clear. Yes, they do shoot horses, but there are better solutions out there.

pnugent@tribune.ie