This weekend, more than 150,000 pastel-wrapped spectators and bettors will descend upon Louisville’s Churchill Downs complex to watch one of America’s greatest competitive spectacles. The 150th running of the Kentucky Derby, headlined by animals whose names (Resilience, Stronghold, Catching Freedom) sound more like Taylor Swift bonus tracks than living creatures, is expected to bring more revenue to the city and venue than ever, with resale tickets reportedly at record highs. If you count TV spectators, nearly 16 million people are expected to tune in to an event that awards major titles to athletes who may not know they’ve won and cannot be interviewed.

The Derby and the two subsequent races that make up the U.S. Triple Crown are normally the year’s highlights for American enthusiasts, but this season will be even more packed with equestrian sports. The Paris Olympics this summer will feature international riders in dressage, show jumping, and the hybridized “eventing” discipline, and these competitions may generate more interest than usual because France is, as the Fédération Equestre Internationale puts it, “heaven for horse lovers.” Equestrian sports first made their Olympic debut in Paris more than 100 years ago.

Equestrian activities such as racing, show jumping, dressage, and eventing are the only elite sports that feature pairs of athletes that are fundamentally unknowable to each other. No one can doubt that the horses are trained specialists. But it’s difficult not to wonder if they have any idea what’s going on.

Deciphering the precise extent of any animal’s cognitive abilities is a tall order. The size and structure of other species’ brains can tell us plenty about how their bodies function, but not what degree of conscious thought or human-style intelligence they’re capable of. What we know about horse cognition in particular is limited, in part because “horses are big and expensive research animals,” says Sue McDonnell, an animal behaviorist and the founding head of the Equine Behavior Program at the University of Pennsylvania School of Veterinary Medicine.

Most of the questions researchers have asked about what it’s like to be a domestic horse are about how they understand humans, not how they understand their surroundings. Horses, for instance, have been found to recognize emotion on humans’ faces and recall them later on. Some recent work demonstrates that horses may be able to perceive basic goals of the humans working with them. They may even attach emotional memories to specific human voices. Cognition-wise, we know that horses possess enough intelligence for basic creative problem-solving and limited working memory. But attempts to understand their internal experiences have been mostly inconclusive, and the data that do exist come nowhere near confirming that horses are able to conceptualize competitive sports (let alone the state of Kentucky).

[Read: Horses can read human facial expressions]

The question of what horses are thinking and feeling during a race, if not a desire for bragging rights or a flowery cape, is hotly debated among the people who study, train, and compete with them. “I can only judge by their expression, but I can say for certain that for most of them, it’s terror,” McDonnell told me. The big, loud crowd; the tight space; and the close presence of unfamiliar animals they can smell but not see prime racehorses to react with adrenaline and fear when the starting bell sounds, she said. “You’d never see that speed in the wild horse unless they were threatened and stressed.” Their fear would be justified: Though the rate of fatal racehorse injury is at a near-15-year low, more than 300 died in 2023, and sport horses experience health issues such as gastric ulcers and pulmonary hemorrhage at rates of more than 70 percent.

It’s quite likely that the horses we race, jump, and otherwise prance about with feel stress while competing: Multiple studies from the past several years have shown as much by testing cortisol levels and other physiological indicators of tension. And though stress isn’t always harmful, evidence suggests that the training racehorses in particular go through can alter, and perhaps damage, their immune health. And we have no way of quantitatively measuring their level of psychological distress, because emotions like anxiety and fear don’t always manifest uniformly.

But horses have also learned to communicate how they’re doing in ways that don’t require laboratory analysis. Like us, they’re incredibly social animals, even with members of other species. (One growing trend in equestrian sports is to provide a lifelong travel companion for jet-setting horses in the form of a pony or goat, McDonnell said. “They’re just much more relaxed when they have their pony friend traveling with them.”) People who spend lots of time with horses can reasonably expect to be attuned to their emotional state. No assessment of a competition horse’s experience is complete without considering the horse-rider relationship, says Rachel Hogg, a psychology lecturer at Charles Sturt University, in Australia, whose Ph.D. work focused on that bond.

[From the March 2019 issue: A journey into the animal mind]

Many equestrian professionals do not believe that their animal colleagues are plagued by fear and anxiety. “Horses enjoy sports when it’s within their capabilities, when they’re treated with respect, and when training practices bring their personality and athleticism out,” says David O’Connor, the chief of sport for the United States Equestrian Federation, and a three-time Olympic medalist in eventing. But how we value a horse’s enjoyment depends on their level of intelligence. Horses might not be capable of realizing that some of their stablemates aren’t at the Olympics or careering around a racetrack. Would their happiness matter more to us if they were?

Part of the reason O’Connor is so adamant that some horses enjoy sports is that he’s seen what happens when they don’t. In the nearly 30 years he spent riding for the United States, O’Connor told me, he regularly saw horses opt out of participating. “Sometimes you’ll get a horse in the starting gate, you’ll start the race, and one of them will just be like, I’m not doing it,” he said. “Or they go out there and take two or three steps and they’re done.” Recognizing a horse’s agency isn’t just good for morale—it can save a rider from potential embarrassment.

Cultivating relationships with horses in which those signals are never missed is the foundation of O’Connor’s riding and teaching, he told me. But not everyone follows that ethos. Sometimes, genuine cruelty is involved: “There’s this tradition in the horse world that you have to dominate them,” McDonnell said. But more often, the barrier to a trusting relationship between horse and rider is logistical. Even at the highest levels of the sports, athletes can rarely afford their own horses, let alone the costs associated with getting them competition-ready.

The Olympic disciplines, in particular, are not conducive to deep relationships between horse and rider. They’re dominated by a “speed dating” system where business-driven owners seek to optimize matches for specific competitions, rather than lifetimes, Hogg said. “Catch riding,” where a horse-rider pair will interact just one or two times before competing together, is more common than ever, she added; athletes can train with nearly two dozen horses in a single day. (At the U.S. collegiate level, catch riding is sometimes mandated to eliminate advantages.) As a result, Hogg told me, some riders see investing in emotional relationships with individual horses as a luxury they literally can’t afford with prizes on the line.

[From the July 1925 issue: Inside the sordid world of horse racing]

And yet the horses at international sporting events, which cannot open bank accounts, are probably more likely to enjoy themselves when paired with an athlete they know well, Hogg said. Research has found that horses prefer and can even be calmed by the presence of familiar humans, and evidence suggests that as a horse and rider get more familiar with each other, their patterns of brain activity begin to sync up during rides. “If a horse is motivated to be involved” in equestrian sports, Hogg said, “it’s because of their social connection with us.”

Redesigning equestrian sports entirely around horses’ psychological welfare would be like redesigning the NFL to completely eliminate injuries: The product would be unrecognizable, and a lot of powerful people would stand to lose a lot of money. It’s also unlikely to be a top priority in a sport where horses are still regularly injured or killed. But maybe just once, instead of holding the Kentucky Derby, a crowd could gather to watch 20 horses simply hang out together at Churchill Downs on live television. They could even bet on which one becomes self-aware first.

Shangri-la is best-known as a fictional place—an idyllic valley first imagined by a British novelist in the 1930s—but look at a map and you’ll find it. Sitting at the foot of the Himalayas in southwestern China, Shangri-la went by a more prosaic name until 2001, when the city was rebranded by Chinese officials eager to boost tourism. Their ploy worked.

The star of Shangri-la is the Ganden Sumtseling Monastery. Since its destruction in 1966, during Mao’s Cultural Revolution, this Tibetan Buddhist monastery has been rebuilt into a sprawling complex crowned by golden rooftops and home to more than 700 monks. It was humming with construction when I visited in October—and filled with Chinese tourists.

Like many monasteries, Sumtseling is thriving thanks to Tibetan Buddhism’s growing popularity in China. When the government loosened restrictions on religious worship in the 1990s, the practice took off, especially among urban elites unsatisfied with the Chinese Communist Party’s materialist worldview. It’s an open secret that even high-ranking party officials follow Tibetan lamas.

Tibetan Buddhism’s recent spread presents both a threat and an opportunity for President Xi Jinping. He wants to make China politically and culturally homogenous, a goal that could be jeopardized by a tradition steeped in Tibetan language and history. But Xi is enacting a program that seeks to turn the rising popularity of Tibetan Buddhism to his advantage—to transform the tradition from a hotbed of dissent into an instrument of assimilation and party propaganda. If it works, it could smooth his path to lifelong power and help him remake China according to his nationalist vision.

[Read: Xi Jinping is fighting a culture war at home]

Tibetan Buddhism isn’t only a spiritual practice; it’s an expression of Tibet’s cultural identity and resistance to Chinese rule. The CCP annexed Tibet in 1951, claiming that the then-independent country belonged to historical China and had to be liberated from the Dalai Lama’s Buddhist theocracy. The Dalai Lama fled to India to establish a Tibetan government-in-exile, and Tibet has been a source of opposition to Beijing ever since.

According to the Tibetan scholar Dhondup Rekjong, Xi’s ultimate goal is to erase Tibet’s language and cultural identity entirely. In a campaign similar to the CCP’s oppression of China’s Uyghur Muslims, Tibetan teachers and writers have been arrested as “separatists” for promoting the Tibetan language, and more than 1 million Tibetan children have been sent to boarding schools to be assimilated into Chinese culture. Xi’s effort to control Tibetan Buddhism is just one piece of this long-standing effort to suppress Tibetan identity, but it has taken on an additional valence as the practice expands in China.

To co-opt Tibetan Buddhism’s popularity, the CCP recruits religious leaders willing to implement what it calls Sinicized Buddhism—a combination of state-sanctioned religious teachings and socialist propaganda taught by party-approved clergy—and rewards their monasteries with money and status. The well-funded Sumtseling monastery, for example, has been officially designated by the CCP as a “forerunner in implementing the Sinification of Buddhism.” To detach Buddhism from Tibetan culture, monks are pressured to replace traditional Tibetan-language scriptures with Chinese translations. According to Rekjong, they will soon be expected to practice in Mandarin.

The approach is part of a broader campaign to influence all religions in China. As of January 1, every religious group is legally required to “carry out patriotic education and enhance the national awareness and patriotic sentiments of clergy and believers.” Failure to pledge loyalty to Xi, display the Chinese flag, and preach “patriotic sentiments” is now punishable by law. If Mao wanted to eliminate religion, Xi wants to nationalize it.

Co-opting Tibetan Buddhism will bring Xi one step closer to achieving what he and the CCP call the “Chinese dream,” a vision that seeks to unite China’s ethnic groups—its Han majority, Tibetans, Uyghurs, Mongolians, and dozens more—in their dedication to the motherland and party. Xi has already consolidated more political power than just about any other modern leader, but realizing the Chinese dream will require something arguably more difficult: winning the hearts and minds of his subjects. As communist ideology loses its allure, Xi is enlisting religion to sell his program to the people.

But it may not be that easy. Joshua Esler, a researcher who studies Tibetan culture at the Sheridan Institute of Higher Education, in Australia, told me that Tibetan Buddhism has grown so popular precisely because it offers the Chinese something their government can’t. Many Han Chinese, he said, “believe that Tibetan Buddhism has retained a spiritual authenticity that is lost in China.” They see Tibet as an alternative to the corruption, materialism, and environmental degradation that characterize life under the CCP. Any government interference in Tibetan Buddhism might alienate its followers, pushing them toward Buddhist leaders who secretly support the exiled Dalai Lama.

[Arthur C. Brooks: Five teachings of the Dalai Lama I try to live by]

As for Tibetans themselves, Sinicized Buddhism is unlikely to become popular anytime soon. Many of them consider monasteries that have too eagerly embraced Xi’s program to be sellouts. But as the government ramps up its campaign—and as a new generation of assimilated Tibetans comes of age—that might begin to change.

After visiting Shangri-la, I went to the remote Tibetan town of Daocheng, where a young monk named Phuntsok showed me around his monastery. “Without the Communist Party, we would not have freedom of religion,” Phuntsok told me as we walked through ornate chapels. He extolled the CCP’s support for Tibetan Buddhism, and no wonder: Locals told me that the monastery, Yangteng Gonpa, had received substantial government funding. A freshly paved road snaked up the mountainside on which the monastery was perched, ending at a parking lot built to accommodate hundreds of visitors. A new welcome gate was being erected, and the tourism office promoted Yangteng as one of the area’s main attractions.

I followed Phuntsok up to the second floor of a chapel, where he showed me an exhibit celebrating the monastery’s “liberation” by the Red Army in 1950. The space doubled as a classroom; a whiteboard showed the faint outlines of a lesson on how monks can “actively guide religion to adapt to socialist society.” Though the monastery belongs to the Buddhist tradition of the Dalai Lama, Phuntsok didn’t mention the exiled spiritual leader, whose name and image are censored in Tibet.

Mural at the Yangteng Gonpa monastery celebrating its “liberation” by the Red Army (Photograph by Judith Hertog)

Instead, Phuntsok praised Gyaltsen Norbu, a Buddhist leader who was handpicked by the CCP as a child to be the Panchen Lama, a position second only to the Dalai Lama. (Many Tibetans don’t recognize Norbu as legitimate; in 1995, the Dalai Lama identified another child as the Panchen Lama, whom Chinese authorities promptly detained, and whose whereabouts remain unknown.) When the 88-year-old Dalai Lama dies, Norbu will likely be tasked by the CCP to select his replacement, who will be raised under CCP supervision and expected to promote Sinicized Buddhism. Westerners tend to imagine the Dalai Lama as a force for peace and human rights, but the position can just as easily be put into the service of totalitarianism.

Gray Tuttle, a Tibetan-studies professor at Columbia University, told me that the CCP is wary of any religious movement that isn’t under its control. In 2017, the government issued orders to tear down Larung Gar, Tibet’s most popular Buddhist monastery. Thousands of residents, including many Han Chinese, were displaced from the remote valley where they had come to study. The official reason for the evictions was that the monastery didn’t comply with safety regulations; the likelier explanation is that, despite the government’s initial support for the monastery, the CCP felt threatened by its success and the influence of its teachers. “The CCP definitely wants to limit the charismatic power of any particular lama,” Tuttle told me.

The challenge Xi has set for himself, then, is to reshape Tibetan Buddhism without undermining its allure. Judging by the large crowds at Sumtseling, he’s succeeding—at least among some Han Chinese. “Tibetan lamas possess the deepest knowledge,” a Han woman named Jin Yi, who had traveled 400 miles to the monastery to meet her guru, told me. But devotees like her were considerably outnumbered by tourists, many of them dressed up as Tibetan pilgrims and modeling for photos—striking lotus poses, spinning prayer wheels, or staring in feigned rapture at Buddhist murals. Few entered the chapels, where photography was prohibited. Government-sponsored monasteries like Sumtseling might attract tourists looking for a photo op, but lavish temples won’t win over true believers.

Australia’s biggest airline has agreed to pay a A$100 million ($66.1 million) in a civil penalty and millions more to customers to settle litigation accusing it of selling thousands of tickets for flights that had already been canceled.

Read more...

Competition watchdog says national carrier's advertising of cancelled flights was 'egregious and unacceptable'.