I was at an event called the Lemon Festival is Riverside California one fine morning, strolling back to the beer garden for a refill when I walked by a young lass handing out small blue flyers. Fully expecting the flyer to be for a local band, and loving the live music scene, I grabbed one from her as I walked by. I quickly saw that it was not a flyer for a local band, but was instead a flyer for an upcoming PETA meeting. Having worked in the horse racing field most of my life (and having just been on horses on Santa Anita that very morning) I knew of PETA’s tactics against horse racing, and had verbally sparred with their members before, so I turned around and asked the girl how many trees died to make her flyers?
She retorted that they had a lot of recycled paper in them (yeah sure) and then, glancing at my leather boots asked me in a snooty tone “Do you really have to wear leather boots?
“Why yes”, I calmly replied “in my line of work it’s pretty much required.”
“What do you do? she asked, eyes narrowing suspiciously.
“I exercise race horses.” I said with a smile, knowing the rant she was about to launch into. Sure enough she took a deep breath and I could see the talking points flashing through her eyes as she prepared to toss out every cliched piece of bs that PETA uses in their anti horse racing rants, and I quickly held up my hand before she could actually utter a sound and said;
“Sweetheart, if God didn’t want us to ride horses he wouldn’t have given us cows to make saddles out of.”
Her instantaneous deflation was replaced by a simmering anger that made my smile even bigger as she actually HHRRMMPPHH’d at me, stomped her foot and stormed away.
Me: 1
PETA: 0
