Am I the only one who couldn't care less about the death of Barbaro?
He was a horse, fer chrissake. Sure, he ran fast and won the Kentucky Derby, but his death doesn't deserve the lead story treatment it's been getting all day in newscasts both local and national. The only media outlet that had the right perspective was Fark.com, whose headline read, "Barbaro's status is finally downgraded to glue."
And who are these people who are sending cards and condolences to Barbaro? His ability to read those cards is severly hampered not only by being dead, but also because of that whole being a horse thing. These must be the same pinheads who sent flowers to Princess Diana's grave. I'll bet that, somewhere in America, there's an elementary school teacher who has given her class the assignment of making "we miss you" cards for this horse. Argh! Where are the cards for our dead soldiers, or the eight-year-old boy who died in a freak accident in his school cafeteria in Shiloh today, and on and on?
What's really sad is that Barbaro was treated with more dignity than many humans. The reason his owners gave for having him put down was that they realized he'd live the rest of his life in extreme pain, and they didn't want him to suffer through that. If it's okay to give a racehorse some relief, why not afford humans the same respect? It's unfair that Jack Kevorkian is sitting in a jail cell while Barbaro's vet is considered one of the good guys. Where are the classrooms full of kids learning that Dr. Death was a hero?
Helping people who don't want to deal with a lifetime of unbearable pain (like some bone cancer sufferers, for instance) should be considered a noble thing, not a crime. I'm sure the dead horse won't mind my invoking his name to point out that it's more than ludicrous that we can be cruel to sick people, but not to sick animals -- in fact, it's barbaric.