Palio di Siena: The World’s Wildest Horse Race (2015) | Hacker News Reader

Palio di Siena: The World’s Wildest Horse Race (2015)

cntraveller.com

25 pointstomhoward8 comments

My partner and I are Italians and she is a natural horsemanship/Parelli trainer and absolutely abhors the Palio because she can point to multiple instances of cruelty to the animals and coercion. I myself am very wary of horses (bad fall when I was six, thirty years later I still refuse to get back in the saddle) but even I can now appreciate the difference between a relaxed, non-threatened horse and these poor creatures.

I'm not an animal rights activist by any measure, but just as many people now question the corrida, I'm coming to the conclusion that is time to revise some traditions, such as this one.

interesting trivia: this year, one of the horses "refused to run" (i.e. it was so nervous it was impossible to get it/him/her to stand at the line). Animal rights activists had a lot to say on that.

I think the Mongolian Derby should take the top spot in any list of the wildest horse races.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mongol_Derby

There's disappointingly little about actual horse racing in the article.

Sure, but basically the Palio is everything BUT the race.

It is all the before and the after that is much more interesting that the race itself.

In that the article is very well made.

That's an interesting statement actually, firstly because I (and almost everybody else) tend to agree, and secondly, because if one then segues to suggest that the horse-racing component be significantly modified or even removed, those same people recoil in horror and vehemently protect the centrality of the horse-racing component. This would seem to be somewhat paradoxical, but I have observed this often.

Winning the race is the whole point, everything else is overoptimization and overcomplication of the horse race, developed in hundreds of years and hundreds of runs. For instance, what would you celebrate about without racing?

It is like saying that (say) the Monopoly or Risk game revolve around throwing a coupe of dices (which is actually what they revolve around).

Still the actual dice throwing is the least interesting part.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com