4 Subtitle Sport

4.1       A.Nevzorov (off screen): The key thing here is not to keep track of whether a horse has jumped over the “painted sticks” or not, but simply to look into its eyes and into its mouth to see the sufferings behind the glitter, to whip your attention from the action – whether it has jumped over or not -  to the horse itself that is not difficult to do.
4.2       A.Nevzorov (on screen): Well, here everything can be seen clearly. Here is the tongue. As you know, the tongue is a place where nerve endings and all kinds of different taste receptions are concentrated, it is a very sensitive part of the body. And you can see that, once the tongue is squeezed by the bit, it is not only jammed and pushed back, but it is also dragged back and stiffed into the horse’s throat, in fact, the tongue is right there. Yes, yes, here is where you can see how far back into the throat it is  stiffed through the action of human hands and the bit. Physiologists classify the kind of pain caused by ordinary bit as one of the strongest.
            Right now I’m going to explain to you what this nice young guy is doing. He is carrying out a procedure that in the language of sport in known under the name of “sawing”. “Sawing” is the intense twitching of the position of the reins from one side to another compared to the movement of a saw.
         This sawing leads to the effect that on the toothless parts of the lower jaw, the bone which is covered with a very thin layer of mucous membrane starts to be damaged and even fractured.
Well, here everything can also be seen very clearly. Here is the snaffle, here is the horse’s mouth. During the intense  reining, during the so-called  “sawing” , the central part of the snaffle not only sticks into  the palate, gets hold of the tongue, jams it and stuffs it back into the throat, but it  may fracture the teeth as well.
            Look closely at what is happening to the horse’s head. As a result of the continuous beating of the bit on the jaw in the place where  trigomenal nerves are located , the so-called clonic convulsion eventually develops.
            And on top of all, in sport they beat the horse. They beat it repeatedly, incessantly ,‘ from the heart’, without rest. They beat it on the shoulders, on the croup , on the neck, on the eyes, on the head. It is beaten by professionals and amateurs, by elderly and young people and even children are taught to do the same. They teach that sadism to children, they teach them to beat a horse paralyzed with pain in the mouth, to beat it in such a way that it would “feel the pain” as the sportsmen put it. They tactfully call it “a punishment”.
 4.3        A.Nevzorov(off screen): For instance, during this competition, which was rather  typical one, not a single sportsman was ‘sent off with a foul’ or removed for roughness or cruelty. Everything you see is not outrageous behavior but a norm. I want to notice  that it was quite ordinary, official competition supported by the Russian Federation of Equestrian Sport. Here it is - the revenge of Yahoo – long-expected and realized to the full. His dream and his hope!
            The beating is quite a common thing. Sportsmen beat the horse during training sessions to break its will and make it jump over those damned “painted sticks”, they beat it before the competition to cheer it up, they beat it during the competition and after it to load it on the trailer to carry it away. It is worth listening to the confession of a sportswoman to realize the realities of equestrian sport to the full.
4.4         The sportswoman: Well, it’s like the hotter the sport, the higher the level is, the harder we beat them. Sometimes we give  lessons of obedience, that’s we beat them when we are five or six, so that they can’t break free, you know. But it’s their eyes that go, really. You hit the eyes with a whip, and they can flow out, or there could be a wall eye. But this just goes with the territory, so to speak. How can you not beat it if it doesn’t want to jump over the obstacle? It must jump, not freak out. And the only way to make it jump is to beat it, everyone does it, some beat more, some beat less. But sometimes you get horses like mine, it just doesn’t go over if you don’t beat it until the blood shows. Or yeah, and there are also these “compresses”. Some “apply compresses”, others just take a steel chain and hit the horse on the legs with it.

4.5         A.Nevzorov (on screen): But all those talks that the horse’s mouth gets used to the pain caused by bit are complete rubbish.
 4.6       A.Nevzorov (off screen): Come to think of it. What is it – “to get used to pain”? It implies the adaptation of tissues to the outside interference which is commonly called “callus”. But callus cannot appear on mucous membranes - this is a law of physiology,  and the mouth is one big  mucous membrane, so adaptation is completely excluded. It is worth considering the consequences of the equestrian sport though they are carefully concealed.
4.7          A.Nevzorov (on screen): I cannot tell for sure what’s wrong with him here. It might be broken teeth, or a torn mouth or something more serious than that. I just know that something is wrong and that is the flipside of any equestrian competition.
4.8           A. Nevsorov (off screen): There are other kinds in the equestrian sport besides jumping. There is also  a relatively recent and yet insignificant phenomenon in the fate of a horse which involves flashy pompous performance of common movements  the  name for which is “dressage”. In dressage all movements of a horse are based on reflexes and caused by the infliction of pain. This kind, along with the others in the equestrian sport, is based on beating and the devices to cause the pain, but here they are more elaborate and excrutiating than those used in jumping.

4.9             A.Nevzorov (on screen): Let me explain. This is a curb bit. It is widely used in  sport as a device for causing intolerable paralyzing pain. Besides the pain provoked by a snaffle a curb presses on almost every part of the head involved in bitting. It sticks  into the soft palate by its port, and the mouthpiece puts tremendous pressure across the tongue and bars provided by a leverage -  long things called the shanks. Moreover, there exists another sadistic tool, the so-called “ curb chain”. The matter is that a horse has a very sensitive chin. There is nothing there except the bone and a paper-thin layer of skin plus some branches   of trigeminal nerves. And during the action of a curb this  chain starts to squeeze the branches of trigeminal nerves and, in fact, sticks the bone.
4.10          A.Nevzorov (off screen): And it is for whiff of adrenaline, for ambitions, and for this piece of a cardboard with a ribbon that’s called a rosette that sportsmen and their imitators go on tearing apart mouths, beating and tearing apart mouths again, breaking legs and rupturing tendons of this astonishing, noble and  defenseless animal which is known under the name “horse”.
4.11          A.Nevzorov (on screen): The equestrian sport cannot be considered a sport by in essence. Moreover, the equestrian sport undermines the noble and glorious idea of sport. In fact, sport stands for breaking records, for achieving victory, but these records and victories have to be bought with the price of your own sweat, your own blood and sufferings, your overcoming yourself.
          The equestrian sport, on the contrary, is parasitizing on the physical abilities of another creature who doesn’t give its consent for getting involved in it and is forced to do it through pain and beating. Then, how can it be called a sport?
 4.12        A.Nevzorov (off screen): We can also discover a similar kind of criminal record in  other human pastimes that deal with horses. In racing, for instance…