Frankel. Simon Cooper
Чтение книги онлайн.
Читать онлайн книгу Frankel - Simon Cooper страница 13
Название: Frankel
Автор: Simon Cooper
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: Биографии и Мемуары
isbn: 9780008307059
isbn:
She sees nothing of this; Galileo is away and behind her. Her movements are restricted by not only two handlers at her head but giant soft felt boots that engulf her rear hooves. Her hobbling gait looks uncomfortable but it’s necessary; a single kick can inflict great damage on both horse and human, so the boots are put on soon after she arrives in the barn. Like at the teasing rail Kind stands legs splayed. Braced. At her head one handler takes the reins, while the other stands by with the twitch in hand, which is nothing more than a stout broom handle with a loop of rope at the end. A few yards away the foal looks on, eyes fixed on his mother in a scene that must be totally incomprehensible, leaning hard against the handlers as if to take comfort from their grip.
Kind is allowed to look around to see Galileo is approaching; it is important she is not caught unawares. The twitch is applied to her upper lip, the rope loop twisted around to cause a certain amount of pain. At first, this is both a distraction and a restraint. Then a rush of endorphins kicks in, dulling the pain before creating a feeling of calm. The moment has nearly arrived. Galileo is ready. Anyone can see that. But Kind’s signals are more subtle. She lowers her rear in a very slight squat before raising her tail and winking to her stallion, the vulva turning outwards to expose her clitoris.
Galileo raises himself up on his hind legs, pausing for a moment in mid-air before, with remarkable poise, he lowers himself slowly down, his front legs sliding either side of Kind’s back before gripping at her belly. He doesn’t slump over. He uses his colossal strength, aided no doubt by pumping adrenalin, to hold himself above her. Beneath, his rigid penis sways from side to side. The stallion manager steps forward, guiding Galileo into Kind. At the moment of penetration Galileo arches his back, leans forward to bite her on the neck, gripping her mane and a roll of flesh in his mouth, the combination of legs and teeth giving him enough purchase to start thrusting into Kind.
The mating is not as violent or as animalistic as you might imagine. Kind is ready. Compliant. Relaxed, even. Galileo by contrast is the picture of concentration, his tail stretched downwards to the ground in perfect alignment with his back, his neck and head curved, his eyes gone to another place. While he thrusts and thrusts and thrusts. There is very little noise. Some deep sucks of air. Hooves readjusting on the floor. The smack of flesh on flesh. Spittle trails appear down Kind’s neck. A patch of her mane becomes matted wet. Nobody talks.
It doesn’t last for long. I didn’t time it, but I counted the seconds in my head. Maybe twenty-five or thirty from penetration to ejaculation. Everyone turns to the stud manager who nods. It is over. He has felt the sperm pulsing through the urethra at the base of the penis. It is important to know that it has truly happened. Galileo pauses for a few seconds further over Kind to allow his engorgement to subside before he slides back, off and away.
Relieved of the pressure, Kind straightens her legs and stands upright again. She pricks her ears at the sight of the foal, the two led on converging paths meeting just before they go out of the door. Bullet Train skips with joy at their reunion, giving his mother a gentle nudge to the belly. Kind turns her head to him ever so slightly, as if by way of grateful maternal acknowledgement, before they disappear from view. Across the other side, Galileo is leaving. There are no backward or lingering glances. It is most definitely over. Within a minute or two the barn is empty of both people and horses. All that is left is a few damp patches on the floor from the wash down water and, lying at crazy angles and in random spots, a pair of discarded felt boots.
Creation day has lasted less than an hour.
4
You are probably asking yourself at this particular moment why the bloodstock industry goes to all this trouble of bringing horses together from all corners of the globe for a physical mating. As you will have gathered, it is a huge and expensive logistical jigsaw. Have they not heard of artificial insemination? If it is good enough for cows, pigs, polo ponies, sheep and just about any other animal or even bird you care to name, why not horses? For goodness sake, we humans have been at it since the London surgeon John Hunter carried out the first documented insemination and subsequent successful birth in the 1770s. As ever with all things horse racing, the answer is, all at once, that complex mixture of tradition, rules, money and hard science.
Tradition is the easy one to tick off. I like the fact that horse racing embraces tradition. Maybe furlongs are today only ever used in ploughing matches and on racecourses, but doesn’t that make it interesting and different? We like our conversations a little odd. Okay, when you say, ‘I got 6–4 about that horse’ a little mental agility is required, but it slips off the tongue better than any metricised 1.5–1. Of course, we could take the bulldozers to the switchback Derby course at Epsom to reduce it to a perfectly flat and uniform oval, but where would be the unique test of the racehorse in that?
If you are thinking, well, I don’t give a damn about tradition, I’m going to be progressive about all this in embracing modern science, then you will find your foal forever excluded from thoroughbred horse racing around the globe which requires all horses to be registered in the General Stud Book. The wording is definitive: ‘Any foal resulting from or produced by the processes of Artificial Insemination, Embryo Transfer or Transplant, Cloning or any other form of genetic manipulation not herein specified, shall not be eligible for registration in The General Stud Book.’ That closes the door on anything produced other than by what the rules call ‘natural service’, as we just witnessed between Galileo and Kind.
Then, of course, there is the money thing. The most productive bulls are inseminating over fifty thousand cows a year each. It doesn’t take a Nobel prize-winning economist to work out the supply and demand implications. Not only would there be a flight to a very few top stallions (only 95,000 thoroughbreds are registered worldwide each year) but the market would entirely collapse for everyone else. It is no exaggeration in saying that thousands of stallions would cease to be. Nobody would want them in physical or test-tube form.
But aside from the money, the flight to a very few stallions would be a slow-burning disaster for the thoroughbred breed. Interbreeding, in horses and animals or even people for that matter (think The Madness of King George), eventually causes the bad, or more correctly recessive, genes to crowd out the good. Within a matter of generations, fewer and fewer foals would reach the racecourse as birth abnormalities became more commonplace. The racehorse as we know it – lithe, fit and fast – that began with those Arabian stallions all those centuries ago, would soon cease to be.
On something of a tangent you might be wondering, as I did, why those recessive genes haven’t taken hold in cattle. Fifty thousand sounds like an awful lot of offspring. Well, it is and it isn’t. There are currently 1.5 billion head of cattle on the planet (the most are in Brazil at 210 million, in case you ask). So, Galileo is fathering about one in 325 of the worldwide crop of foals each year, whereas Toystory, the most productive bull in history with roughly 500,000 calves to his name in nine years (he died in 2014), was producing a ‘mere’ one in 6,000 annually.
An in-foal Kind returned to a different Banstead Manor Stud than the one she had left. Two months on from the bleak of February, spring had come to the Suffolk countryside. The beech trees were in vivid green leaf. Birds were nesting among the hedges that separate the paddocks. The farm tractor was rolling the fields, the broad striped grass adding a certain gaiety to the morning turn out. Kind was paired with Prove in the Blackthorn paddock, a more experienced mare who had raced in France, the two mothers-in-arms with foals to care for inside СКАЧАТЬ