PETA vs. Bin Laden: News Stranger Than Fiction
Omar Osama bin Laden (left) and his British wife Jane Felix-Browne, who has taken the Muslim name Zaina Alsabah, live in Cairo, Egypt.The famous off-road car race was canceled for security reasons, fearing terrorist intervention.
Enter Omar Osama bin Laden, the 26-year-old estranged son of Al Queda leader Osama bin Laden. Bin Laden the Younger has proposed a horse race to replace the car race, and is serving as spokesman and organizer, with his British wife. The race would cover 4800 km (roughly 3000 miles) and the horses would "race" 30 miles per day.
Bin Laden refers to the project in the international press as a "peace mission".
PETA calls it cruelty.
"Horses are flesh and blood. Such a gruelling race will mean fatalities, not peace. Animals have not declared war on us-they should be truly left in peace," wrote PETA founder Ingrid Newkirk in an open letter to bin Laden.
The original article that provoked Newkirk to protest was published in an Australian newspaper, The Sun Herald on January 19. News agencies around the world picked up the bin Laden the Younger story yesterday only after PETA publicized the horse race.
Omar's father was a devotee of horses before his disappearance to lead Al Queda from secret locations. He abandoned his now-aging Arabian racehorses when he fled Khartoum in Sudan, but a caretaker there still maintains them for him.
Drawing the attention of PETA may give the event and its organizers' peace message more publicity than they could have obtained from running the race.
Labels: endurance, Osama bin Laden
posted by Fran Jurga @ Tuesday, February 05, 2008
2 comments
2 Comments:
Oh, for pete's sake. If PETA want to actually do something worthwhile (and probably lose their minds in the process) they should hie themselves over to Nazlit Semman, the area of Giza near the pyramids and Sphinx, sit down at the Abu Basha stable where the couple got their horses according to the saddle blankets and discuss the abuse of underage, underfed, and untrained horse to fleece tourists and locals who want to ride "by the pyramids". The stables in Nazlit Semman are notorious for the mistreatment of their horses and their clients, most of whom cling precariously to some motheaten saddle that last saw maintenance under the British regime in Egypt, while being chased across the desert by some child wielding a whip. The stables make a lot of money from semi-blind tourists (they must be to think that these poor animals are actually horses) and by buying and selling horses. Now THAT is abuse.
Endurance rides/races are monitored by vets and anything of the distance envisioned by Mr. Binladen would be done in daily stages usually of 80 km or less...a reasonable traveling distance for a horse. The riders in such a case would probably be the weakest link assuming that the route and schedule were properly worked out to travel across North Africa. How on earth do people think that humans traveled before the internal combustion engine. Good Lord.
So this proves that horses not only have more stamina then humans, they have more brains too. Using a horse to travel some hours a day is considered cruelty, leaving it in a stable for 23 hours a day is good care? Horses should be treated in a horse apropriate way, not humainly (they could pick up a habit of killing there fellow horses for example)
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