BACK AT the dawn of humanity, our ancestors came up with a series of masterstrokes. One of the best was the domestication of animals: joining forces with a different species. When we first started to select from the wild and breed, we looked for tameness. We didn’t pick the fiercest wolf to be a fireside pet and guardian, we picked the soppiest. We didn’t pick the most ferocious cow to be the milker, we picked the most biddable.
Our domestic animals have been selectively bred for generations for their usefulness to us: and mostly, usefulness depends on tameness. There is a wolf in the heart of every dog on the hearth rug, but it seldom troubles the dog himself, still less his owner.
And then we get to horses. Specifically, to thoroughbred horses: that is to say, the breed of horses that race . . . the endlessly listed and catalogued horses you find racing all over the world, every one of which can trace its ancestry back to the three great founding grandsires of the dynasty.
Many people have a thing for horses. But for some, the hardest to please, it is a thing about thoroughbreds. That is because the thoroughbred — more than any other domestic animal in human history — has been selectively bred for wildness.
Or not exactly, for the thoroughbred resembles Przewalski’s horse, still running wild, just about, in Mongolia, much as a Ferrari resembles a Series One Land-Rover. But a thoroughbred is bred to race, and to race a horse needs to be in touch with its wilderness self. It needs a swift and impulsive personality, a tendency to react, if not over-react, to the slightest stimulus. Above all, it needs to have its being in speed.
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A horse — every horse — is a flight animal, not a fight animal, and its survival, its pride, its sense of its own being, is centred on movement. Multiply that simple fact by a factor of ten and add a bottle of Tabasco, and you have a thoroughbred.
So there I was, out in the New Forest with Nick Campbell, a man whose heart beats for the thoroughbred alone. “You get a thoroughbred, you’ve got the gallop,” he said. “Everything else you can school in.” The gallop, the innate gallop, is at the heart of everything that a thoroughbred does.
Which is fine when you are seeking to race. But when a horse has finished with racing — or more likely when racing has finished with the horse — then there is a hard question of what happens next. The wastage rate in racing is fierce: racing is the land of dreams, and most dreams turn sour sooner rather than later.
Campbell buys ex-racehorses and turns them into three-day eventers, to compete on himself, to sell on. A racehorse needs only to gallop — horse people traditionally say that a racehorse arrives for retraining with two established paces: stop and piss off. Campbell seeks to turn these beautiful but troublesome creatures into animals that will perform the stylish intricacies of dressage, the precise athleticism of show-jumping, and the ultimate test of courage over the horrendous jumps of cross-country.
Don’t try this at home. It’s not easy. And the first problem comes with picking the right horse: knowing what you are looking for when you visit the ultimate second-hand sales at Ascot, when the racing flops come under the hammer.
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Campbell is 27, with the infinitely quiet manners that you often find around very good horse people. If there is something of shyness about him, it is nothing to do with shortage of self-confidence. You don’t retrain a racehorse without being very certain of yourself at the sharp end of horsemanship.
You look for a horse that’s built right — for that ideal conformation that argues both athleticism and a knack of avoiding injury. You look for history: a horse raced lightly or even not at all — plenty of young dreams never reach a racetrack. And you look for a reputable trainer, one you know will not have cut corners or knocked the horses about.
And beyond that, you look for something that strikes a chord in yourself, something that makes you say “yes”. The process of buying a racehorse has often been described as looking at pretty girls and waiting for the one that makes you go phwoar. It’s not quite the same in this case: you have to see a girl that you wouldn’t mind marrying.
Because the re-training of a thoroughbred is a complex relationship, one that requires commitment and a great deal of understanding, tolerance and tact on both sides. It will certainly involve times of trouble and heartbreak as well.
If that sounds a little excessive then learn this: it is not possible to live the horsey life in a half-hearted way. And that rule counts double for thoroughbreds. But then just about all the other rules do as well.
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And there is Nick riding a lithe, athletic chestnut called Lucy — an unraced thoroughbred more formally known as Red Rangoon — and there is love blazing from his eyes. She’s the one. Maybe. A horse which embodies that great oxymoron of the thoroughbred: a horse with a biddable wildness.
And then, out into the New Forest, Campbell’s 100 sq mile training ground, with its vast population of feral ponies doing just whatever they bloody well choose. I got to ride a five-year-old called Todd. A long time since I was last on a thoroughbred. A thoroughbred is a horse that’s missing a layer of skin: a horse with exaggerated, almost morbid sensitivity, like Marcel Proust.
A thoroughbred is sharp. That’s the word normally used: there is absolutely no perceptible lag between action and reaction. A thoroughbred doesn’t send you a telegram before doing something: frequently, it’s already done it by the time you are preparing your response. Nothing looks quite as good as a thoroughbred, and we horse-people are a vain lot, on the whole, and we love to look good on a horse: as good as the horse can make us, anyway. Plenty of people fall into the thoroughbred trap — fall in love with these somewhat excessive animals and then find themselves over-horsed: trapped in a thankless love affair with an animal that is slightly too much.
A thoroughbred is not a horse for everybody: but if you seek scope and promise — if you seek dreams — then a thoroughbred will bring them faster than most. What horses are to everyday life — extra wildness, extra excitement, extra unpredictability — thoroughbreds are to horses. A step beyond. Canalise that wildness — that’s the thing. Campbell and his Lucy: sharing the wildness, dreaming the dream.