February 22, 2008
As we noted in ‘The Shark Book‘, horses once served man as a primary mode of transport and then were thanked for their years of service with new posts in society as fodder for glue and rendering plants and as a key ingredient in the nation’s dog food.
Another popular use for horses has been to gather them at tracks, put lilliputian men atop them and force them to race one another while the audience bring ruination upon themselves through gambling, softening the blow of every lost dollar with a fortifying drink. 
Occasionally, this spectacle of soaking up hooch like a dish rag, cursing and haggling with hookers is undertaken with pretension, as is the case with the running of the Royal Ascot. There, in ‘94 as we chronicled in the book, a drunk galoot, aiming to get a closer look at the ‘gorgeous’ (source newspaper’s quotation marks) women in the Royal Enclosure, nearly got trampled to death in front of Her Majesty, the Queen Mother and the Duke of Edinburgh.
This recent example from NSW, Australia, though less benign (unless you count all the angry punters willing to put this man’s life in danger for having nullified the race results) involved a man celebrating a stag party with his closest mates, who decided to strip down and offer up a photo finish [seen here]
