Originally published at: Starship Chewbacca wins Horse Race at Santa Anita | Boing Boing
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I’m from a horse family (dressage and western show, not racing which is cruel and should be stopped). They take these goofy names very seriously. The words convey the lineage, and let’s just say they ran out of “normal” sounding horse names hundreds of years ago. You wouldn’t believe the gibberish strings of word salad that hard-as-nails horse people will say with a straight face. As the outsider in the mix, I giggle in my head a lot about it.
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“Starship Chewbacca”. . .
Finally I’ve found a name worthy of my first born child.
“What do you mean you’re filing for divorce??”
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Every Star Wars fan in attendance cleaned up on that race.
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Reminds me of the few times i’ve been to dog races.
Sadly betting on the dog with the silliest name is not a particuarly effective strategy 
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Basically as far as the treatment of the animals and the exploitation of their caretakers go, you can lean all you need to know by watching The Last Jedi.
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This isn’t Jefferson Airplane/Starship cover band that dresses up Star Wars cosplay?
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isn’t Santa Anita the track where a shit load of horses have died in the last couple of years? like 30-40 horses just kicked?
super sad, but as pointed out aboce, horse racing IS cruel and should be stopped!
edit: not meant as a response to @failquail , just a general reply
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No prob.
This was in the UK for my post and i’m not sure id go to one again. Too likely for animal abuse i’d agree.
I did like the profoundly stupid names though 
Yes it is. They really just need to convert the venue into a full-time Corgi race track. My family went to see the Corgi Nationals there and had a great time.
https://www.santaanita.com/events/socalcorginationals/#.Yhz6wyU77YU
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That’s all horse racing tracks. It’s a brutal sport with a lifespan measured in single digit years for the horses. It needs to stop.
The deaths are mostly all mercy killings, to be clear. Horses are very medically fragile. Virtually any physical injury results in being forced to have them put down. It’s true in all equine sport, but racing is the NFL of equine sports. Injuries are very frequent, thus so are deaths.
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A few years back, I did some “acting” work for the Cornell Vet School — they’d give me scenarios to improvise, so the grad students could get some practice dealing with human clients. The horse scenes were always the most intense. Part of that was that my characters were almost always supposed to be assholes (or at least, had high stakes riding on their horse), and also because the students KNEW that horse people are scary and intense, and that horses are medically fragile, and were anticipating it being the most stressful scenario.
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