All The Pretty Horsies

THE annual Omak Suicide Race is an Eastern Washington tradition that the squeamish, the guilty and the misinformed would love to kill.

In the Omak Suicide Race, about 20 horseback riders gallop down a 200-foot cliff, ford a river, climb the riverbank and race to the nearby rodeo arena. The riders are almost always Colville Indians, many of whom have grown up dreaming of competing like their fathers and brothers. It's an amazing feat of bravery with a level of risk that hints at foolhardiness. Riders are often injured, and since 1983, nearly one horse a year has died.

Protests from animal-rights activists have spurred Omak Stampede organizers into making the race safer, widening the course and adding swim tests and veterinarian checkups for the horses.

That's not enough for animal-rights activists, who ignore the cost of the ban they demand: Omak would lose the heart of its annual rodeo, which brings $3 million to the local rural economy each year; the community would lose a race steeped in the tradition of Native American mountain racing, a race that complements the cowboy rodeo next door, with its calf-roping, steer-wrestling and bull-riding; the riders would lose a reason to train and care for their horses to be in peak condition.

Nobody likes to see horses die. But all-out bans are hypocritical at best and contagious at worst. If Omak's horse race has to go, so should the Iditarod, where an average of three dogs die each year, nearly 30 in the last decade. If the Iditarod goes, so should the poultry farms that make boneless, skinless, shrink-wrapped main courses possible, thanks to the dark and miserable lives of millions of chickens.

The animal-rights movement is at its best when it forces industries and people to be responsible and compassionate toward animals. It's at its worst when it focuses narrowly on a nice horsie here and a poor kitty there, forgetting that human interaction with other animals is a mirror of nature. It's a complicated interdependence that isn't always pretty, and where death cannot be tucked out of sight.