Living and Dying with OTTBs: Redemptive Capital and Thoroughbred Ex-Racehorse Rescue in Kentucky’s Bluegrass (original) (raw)

In this paper, I will examine how two distinct communities dedicated to Thoroughbred ex-racehorse 1 rescue / retirement in the Kentucky Bluegrass negotiate the threat of death by slaughter to the horses in their care. The first community revolves around a non--profit horse re--training center located in the Kentucky Horse Park; here, OTTBs are "flipped" from being racehorses to ride--able competition or pleasure horses offered for adoption. The second community revolves around an inmate vocational training program at a local minimum--security correctional complex; here, inmates care for rescued and retired OTTBs and in the process receive horsemanship certification. In both communities, I will examine the relationships between OTTBs and their human interlocutors -trainers, farm managers, riders, students, adopters and more -and how the once--and-still--present threat of equine slaughter shapes these relationships through a concept I call "redemptive capital." In my still--working notion of it, redemptive capital is value placed on lifehuman and nonhuman -when said life has been spared from imminent death; I also consider the threat of death to be both mortal and social. When a life is saved, how is it re--valued? What new dimensions of moral, ethical, and financial evaluations are made, and how do they differ across class, race, gender, and species? In November 2010, the Journal of Cultural Anthropology ran a special edition exploring the emergence of multispecies ethnography. In the lead article by Eben Kirksey and Stefan Helmreich, the epistemology of this burgeoning field of inquiry and research was thusly explained: