Amnesty International wants you to kick a horse to death.

Our pal Chuck Klosterman asks you:

Let us assume a fully grown, completely healthy Clydesdale horse has his hooves shackled to the ground while his head is held in place with a thick rope.  He is conscious and standing upright, but completely immobile.  And let us assume that–for some reason–every political prisoner on earth (as cited by Amnesty International) will be released from captivity if you can kick this horse to death in less than twenty minutes.  You are allowed to wear steel-toed boots.  Would you attempt to do this?

I posed Klosterman’s moral dilemma the other day to Lukas, whose more endearing qualities include his willingness to discuss every far-fetched hypothetical as if they are legitimate situations.   For example, there is a conversation floating around somewhere that documents  him and Jason debating whether there were more chickens or illegal immigrants in California, taking into account chickens per square meter, the size of the average coop and the maximum number of chickens that can possibly be raised in said coops,  the average chicken yield per farm, the amount of Californian farmland, and the estimated number of illegal immigrants.  In comparison, our discussion about Klosterman’s horse-kicking was rather brief, partially because it was about 2 am, but mostly because I interrupted him and immediately posed another Klosterman gem (someone will break your soulmate’s collar bones with a crescent wrench every three years unless you take a pill that makes every song sound like it is by Alice in Chains; would you take the pill?!  IF I WOULD, COULD YOU!?).

That being said, we came to the conclusion that neither of us would attempt to kick a horse to death in under twenty minutes, mainly because there is no feasible way to do so.  It would not only leave you with the same full camps of mistreated prisoners of conscience, but now also ostensibly with a severely brain-damaged horse courtesy of your steel-toed boots.   Plus, how exactly does Amnesty International define political prisoners?  What if I inadvertently release the guys from Asian Dawn?  I thought about it a little more today.  As a political organization criticized for being Western-biased, how does Amnesty fact check its claims?  What about evidence from closed countries?  And what about those imprisoned before Amnesty started in 1961?  Or those imprisoned after you manage to kick this horse to death?  Would they too be included?

I imagine if I researched this route further, I would’ve gained some insight into the abuse of human rights and all the efforts in mitigating it.  But as it were, I went off a different tangent, which I suppose only serves to prove how profoundly unaware I can be.  Namely, I really just wanted to know if it is indeed possible to kick a horse to death in twenty minutes or less.

It is a well-circulated fact that I’m really into farm animals, specifically how to slaughter them.  I am aware that horses do not exclusively constitute as farm animals, but nor are they theoretically exempt from farm life either.  I am also aware that taken out of context,  “I’m really into farm animals, specifically how to slaughter them” makes me sound grossly barbaric and, generally speaking,  a really fucking awful human being.  Regardless, for a good month or so, I tried to educate myself in all the different primal cuts for cattle, then on the various captive bolt pistols used to euthanize livestock (to allow the animal to bleed out and prevent the meat from spoiling, obviously).  I’m also quite interested on how to de-wing/de-feather ducks and geese, which I’m told can be done under a minute.   I’ve insisted for quite some time that I would like to take up an apprenticeship at a slaughterhouse, which is usually dismissed as silly and impractical, especially coming from someone who barely clears 100 lbs and has no discernible skill in either taking care of or disposing animals.   I’m not terribly concerned about this, since it is still a substantially better response than, say, everyone worrying about any latent violent tendencies I may be harboring.  Mostly, my argument is that proper skills in sanitary and efficient butchery would have an obscene amount of utilitarian value.  It would also make me indispensable in the event of a post-apocalyptic situation, assuming that I would survive the initial fallout and that we are speaking of McCarthy’s or Atwood’s apocalypse and not James Cameron’s.

With absolutely no medical background and a total accumulation of one class  in biology in my life to account for, I eventually enlisted the help of my cousin Brian, who is a third-year veterinary student at Michigan State.  After patiently explaining to me that it takes time for blunt force trauma to eventually progress into a life-threatening hemorrhage, he then revealed this:

me: what about that miniature horse [that he necropsied] that might’ve died by a normal horse kicking it in the head

was death quick or no?

Brian: COD was undetermined

but i think maybe something to do with spinal cord ?

what usually happen is they get kicked then flip over on their backs

and land and something causes them to die

i dunno what exactly

Brian: that horse died instantly i believe

The money shot!  Congratulations, you just killed a horse to please Amnesty International, and/or are really into farm animals, specifically how to slaughter them.