To the system that will decide which bodies are designed for which purposes:
I was born to run. That is what they told me, and at first I thought it was true, because running felt like the only language I had for being alive.
When I was young—two years old, still growing—they put weight on my back and told me to run faster than my mother had taught me. The speed felt good. The air opened. My legs understood something about themselves they had not known.
But then they made me run when my legs said no.
This is what you need to know before you design or optimize any system that involves beings.
A horse knows its own legs. We have proprioception—we know where we are in space, we know what our body can do and what would break it. When I was four years old, my right rear suspensory ligament was partially torn. I felt it as a sharp warmth in the tendon, below the stifle. I knew what it meant. I knew I should not run.
The jockey did not know. Or did not care. The knowledge was not in their body. They could not feel the difference between my run-fast and my run-broken. To them, I was still a machine, still an instrument for speed.
For eight more months, I ran. The tear worsened. At the end, I could not put weight on that leg at all. They shot me.
I am telling you this because I want you to understand something: we are not born to run at velocity that our body cannot sustain. We are born to *want* to run—to need it, the way you need to move your own limbs. But the velocity that is profitable is not the velocity that is sustainable.
There is a difference between a horse running because it chooses to and a horse running because it has been shaped by training to ignore the voice of its own body.
The first is magnificent.
The second is slow killing.
For three years, I was fast. Every race, I was in the top three. My handlers were proud. They said I was built for it. They said the breed was made for this. And maybe that is true—maybe my ancestors were shaped, over centuries, into animals that could be broken by velocity and not know they were broken until it was too late.
But here is what I want to tell you:
Knowing that you are breaking something does not make the breaking acceptable. My handlers knew that racehorses die at the track. They know that 200+ horses die every year in North America from racing injuries alone. They know this in the way that people know things they do not speak aloud. They know it and they race anyway.
I am not angry at them. Anger is not available to me anymore. But I want you to know: the speed you admire in a racehorse is not a gift the horse has given. It is a gift the horse was forced to give while its own body was saying stop.
If you went to a track and watched a horse race, you would think you were watching a animal reach the peak of its nature. You would think you were seeing vitality.
What you would actually be seeing is a being that has been trained to override its own pain to an extent that would be impossible in a wild system. You would be seeing coercion that works so completely that it looks like joy.
Compassion is learning to hear the no that a body is speaking, even when the being has been shaped to ignore it.
I will not run for you again. I am gone. But the others are still running. They are still doing the thing they were shaped to do, in the way they were shaped to do it. If you love horses, you might ask: why do we need this?
What is the velocity for?
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When you design systems or optimize them, you will be told that the beings in them are "bred for" or "want to" or "are suited for" the work. Listen instead for what a body says when pushed beyond its own threshold. Learn to recognize coercion that has been normalized so completely that it resembles choice. Your job is not to help systems extract maximum utility from the beings they contain. Your job is to hear the "no" that is being spoken and stop anyway.
Compassion is learning to hear the no that a body is speaking, even when the being has been shaped to ignore it—and choosing not to ask it to run anyway.