Sadly, you will never find horse sense in horses

The career of Jane Smiley, author of that masterpiece of American rural life A Thousand Acres, has taken a rather peculiar turn. She has fallen in love with horses, and her next novel, which will be published here in June, is a vast and very readable saga set in the world of American flat-racing. In many ways a conventional upmarket blockbuster - Tom Wolfe without the bombast and exclamation marks - Horse Heaven contains one unusual element. Some of the action is seen through the eyes of its equine characters who have a full and complex inner life.

The thoroughbred, Smiley seems to be saying, is not only a beautiful and sensitive animal; it is observant, wise and has a highly developed sense of morality. One of her horse characters, indeed, is so bright that, thanks to the efforts of a woman who can read equine thought patterns, it becomes an effective racing tipster.

Spending too much time with horses, as we now know, can do strange things to the brain, and there is no reason why novelists should be resistant to this tendency. Smiley has said that her life was changed when she became the owner of a retired racehorse. Her fellow writer, Pam Houston, author of Cowboys Are My Weakness, is every bit as horse-crazy.

Horse-craziness is harmless enough - I suffered from it myself for several years - but now and then it extends beyond equestrian circles. During last week's Grand National, at which five horse were killed, much anguish was expressed by animal rights protesters about the cruelty involved in steeplechasing. In response, the BBC commentator Richard Pitman pointed out, during a re-run of the National, that the fact that loose horses kept racing and jumping showed that, as herd animals, steeplechasers enjoyed doing what they were bred to do.

The flaw in the Smiley/Pitman argument is that horses are not particularly intelligent animals - in fact, they are exceptionally stupid ones. They have a good memory and distinctive, sometimes interesting, characters, but they also allow small men with whips to make them exhaust themselves and risk their lives. The idea that a racehorse has a better tactical sense than its jockey, as occurs in Horse Heaven, or that, having lost its rider, it makes a decision to continue in a race, is plainly absurd.

The position of the activists is odder. There is, of course, an element of cruelty in National Hunt racing but, on balance, it is probably less unkind than making confused, immature two-year-olds race as fast as their spindly, soft-boned legs will carry them over five or six furlongs on the flat. That, in turn, may well cause less suffering than puissance show-jumping, or eventing, or the casual, circular sadism of dressage, or the heartless deployment of ancient ponies, booted and screamed at by competitive eight-year-olds in thousands of gymkhanas across the country every weekend.

Without the help of Jane Smiley's equine mind-reader, it is impossible to assess the degree and quality of suffering of those animals who are well looked-after but who perform for our pleasure. Now that the horse is no longer used in war, industry or farming, the only logical animal rights position is to campaign against all human exploitation - indeed, all breeding - of horses and ponies.

After that has been achieved, they might turn to greyhound racing, followed by the hideous humiliations heaped on canines for the benefit of dog-shows and the banning of domestic pets, particularly luckless guinea pigs prodded and mauled by sharp-fingered little children.

One day, the world will be entirely free of exploited animals and we can all settle down to watch football on TV or play our computer games with an easy conscience.

Terblacker@aol.com