When Luck was cancelled in March, I wrote that it would be nice if we could get as upset about the health and safety of reality show participants as we do about animal cruelty on set. The New York Times has a disturbing new report about the state of horse racing in New York state that serves as an upsetting reminder that there are people inside the industry who don’t care very much about the fate of the animals they’re entertained by and make a great deal of money by racing even when it’s clear that their bodies are broken, the rot at the snapping point disguised by drugs:

“The horses go perfectly sound right up to the second they snap their leg off,” Mr. Clifton said. The following day he came back with a warning: “If we have one more horse break down, we are going to have a major problem on our hands.” That night, riding in the fifth race, Mr. Clifton heard a bone snap and saw another jockey, Ricky Frazier, vaulting off a horse named Laughing Moon. Mr. Clifton yanked his own mount, but they still went soaring over Laughing Moon. Within minutes, Mr. Frazier was in an ambulance and a veterinarian was administering a lethal injection to Laughing Moon, the ninth Gill horse to die racing in 10 months.

That is when the jockeys decided to take a stand: They would not ride in any race with a Gill-owned horse. Their boycott cast a harsh light on the Pennsylvania Racing Commission and Penn National Gaming, which owns the track.
“It wasn’t the commission or the racetrack or anyone with any responsibility for horses and riders who took action,” said George Strawbridge, a prominent breeder and owner. “It was the jockeys who feared for their life. That’s not a shame. That’s a disgrace.”

The fact that inspections of horses at the track before they race aren’t standard from state to state, giving owners like Michael Gill, the one described in those paragraphs, the ability to essentially go shopping for venues where they can race unhealthy horses, is deeply upsetting. I’m not saying horse racing needs to be federally regulated. But it’s hard to believe that track owners and racing commissions couldn’t come to relatively standard conclusions about the desirability of keeping horses from getting unrepairably injured on the track if only in the interests of keeping jockeys safe. And anyone who thinks watching animals hurt themselves dreadfully is part of the entertainment might want to take a careful look at themselves.

This post contains spoilers through the April 19 episode of Parks and Recreation.

I thought this was not the strongest episode of Parks and Recreation, which laid out good themes this season but has been somewhat stagnant about pursuing them. But it is does feature perhaps the single best instance of synchronicity between television programming and the political process in the animal shelter A story, while also advancing an important issue Leslie will have to deal with if she is elected to City Council.

Leslie, forgetting that she’s running to represent all of Pawnee, goes into the budgeting process determined to fight for her department. She wins, bullying a tired Bradley Whitford into saving her from an 8 percent cut. The problem is, the money comes out of the animal shelter where Champion lived before Andy and April adopted him. And that subsequent cut gives Jennifer a chance to beat both the charges that Mitt Romney abused his dog by crating it for a long drive, and that Barack Obama committed the sin of eating dog in Indonesia as a six-year-old, by going on local television and declaring that “I’m not saying that Leslie Knope is a dog-murderer, per se. But it does raise some questions. Like is she a dog-murderer?”

When she tries to solve that problem, Leslie ends up getting Ann’s job cut (though since she’s still dating Tom Haverford, that is the least of her problems). And the shelter gives April, last seen cutting off attendees at a meeting Leslie was supposed to be running with a sour “All respect, Mr. Hamster Penis,” a chance to pursue something she turns out to care a lot about: finding homes for abandoned animals. She enlists Donna to write up resumes for them—”A lot of these dogs have rescued people from burning buildings,” Donna explains. “This one helped Ray Charles around.” It doesn’t entirely work, but watching April chase down a woman who tries to abandon her cats with the adoption drive is worth it.

The C plot, in which Chris insists that Ron spend a day with him doing yoga and meditating to make sure they’d be compatible if Ron is promoted to deputy city manager, is totally slight—”There’s a hot, spinning cone of meat in the Greek restaurant next door. I don’t know what it is, but I’d like to eat the whole thing,” is wonderful, but old territory. But it illustrates something important. It would be good for this show if Leslie won the race in part to shake everyone out of their own roles. Ann’s new job in City Hall has mostly served to bring her into closer proximity to the rest of the cast, not give her new things to do. Tom’s move away from the Parks Department was a failure both for him personally and creatively for the show. Donna and Jerry could use more to do other than be joke-generators. And April and Andy are clearly growing up and should be given roles to grow into. Parks and Recreation doesn’t need a reboot, but it could use new material for basic plots. And I want to finally get to know Councilman Hauser.

While I was on the way home from Austin last night, HBO permanently suspended production on Luck and announced that it wouldn’t air the episodes it had produced for a second season of the critically-praised but little-watched horse-racing show from David Milch, Michael Mann, and starring Dustin Hoffman. Three horses had been injured so badly in the making of the show that they had to be euthanized, and as Jamie Weinman suggests, I think correctly, that track record became a liability that offset the benefits HBO garnered from renewing the show despite the fact that it wasn’t a smash.

For me, Luck became a kind of litmus test: it was the first critically-regarded show about middle-aged (mostly) white men that I gave myself permission to stop watching because I felt like it didn’t have anything to say to me. I don’t mean to say that I don’t want to watch shows that aren’t about characters who match my demographics exactly—though you are going to hear a rather enormous amount about Girls in coming weeks. But I’m tired of a sense that shows about middle-aged white men behaving aberrantly attract a cultural and critical cachet that attaches itself to no other type of programming. And I just care too much about other things to push them out of my schedule to make room for something like Luck.

My personal feelings on the show aside, though, I do think it’s probably a positive thing that, if the show couldn’t find a way to continue production without destroying horses, HBO cancelled it. We’re not that far removed from the use of trip wires to bring horses down in Westerns, and it’s a good thing we don’t see the damage we do to animals, either accidentally or intentionally, as acceptable. Now if only we could get folks as exorcised about reality shows that require participants to sign contracts that exempt the companies producing the programs from any responsibility if they get raped, we’d be in good shape.

When Cameron Crowe’s We Bought a Zoo came out last year, I was not particularly amused: it’s always seemed to me that treating the welfare of wild animals as all fun and games ignores the safety and needs of everyone involved. And now two stories about a huge private menagerie in Zanesville, Ohio where the owner let the animals lose, killed himself, and left the local authorities to try to contain a hugely dangerous situation (mostly, they had to kill the animals) have made clear precisely how un-cute this situation can be. As y’all know, I’m not particularly in favor of regulating entertainment. But when the thing that entertains you both has physical needs and can pose a danger to you, your neighbors, and itself, I find it stunning that wild animal ownership is unregulated as it is. In Esquire, Chris Jones points out that Terry Thompson’s animal ownership was less regulated than his gun poessession:

Lutz had tried for years to strip Thompson of his personal zoo, but the one animal-cruelty charge the department managed to make stick — concerning the fate of some starved cows and a buffalo — hadn’t had the desired effect. The truth was that Thompson was doing nothing illegal, at least not according to the laws of Ohio. So long as he wasn’t charging admission, he could have all the animals he wanted, virtually unregulated. But Thompson was less fortunate in his handling of another of his hoards, an arsenal of more than one hundred guns. With the assistance of the ATF, Lutz had seen Thompson charged with the possession of illegal firearms after a sting had found some with their serial numbers carefully filed off.

At GQ, Chris Heath goes into more detail on both the regulatory, cultural and ethical issues involved in what I think is a less action-movie-y but more comprehensive piece:

One of the surprising facts about owning animals like these in America right now is that while keeping them may not be cheap, buying them frequently is. Tom Stalf at the Columbus Zoo suggests to me that you can buy a lion for $300—cheaper than many pedigree dogs…Just as “good” private owners explain why they should exist and why “bad” private owners should not, sanctuaries may suggest that they should endure while private owners are phased out, and zoos can loftily assume there are clear reasons that they should be cherished while most kinds of non-zoo ownership should be frowned upon. I can see a logic in some kind of extreme libertarian position (people should be able to do what they want with animals unless they are clearly shown to be doing harm) and, conversely, in a hard-core animal-rights position (no animals should be used for any human purpose whatsoever), but the arguments for everything in between seem murky. Frequently these are based on a confident assessment of the animals’ happiness (a thorny notion), and on the pragmatic need to save animals from a place worse than where they are. (Everyone knows somewhere else worse.)

I’m not a wildlife expert, so I’m not the one to lay out a set of standards here. But I’m not clear what the argument should be for why the requirements for both animals’ and humans’ safety and well-being should be different depending on whether the animals’ owners are zoos or private individuals. In both cases, it seems like we should try to guarantee that the animals have adequate room to move around, a steady, healthy food source, and that the humans in proximity to them who are not their owners are guaranteed a level of safety. Such regulations seem like they’d end up imposing reasonable restrictions on the number of wild animals any one person could own and support. It’s one thing to say that someone has the right to take the risk that an animal who lives with them will rip them to pieces: it’s another entirely to say that their friends and neighbors have to accept being exposed to that risk.

So, animal rights are not one of my top voting issues, but isn’t it a little weird to say that you don’t need any special skills to take care of a tiger? Or 40-odd other animals who aren’t in their natural habitats? It seems less than awesome to have a bunch of zoo animals be the subject of wacky mishaps as a way for a distant dad to bond with his kids: