It’s soring time again in Tennessee. That’s shorthand for the 11 days of late summer leading up to Labor Day when a once-proud but now-scarred Tennessee Walking Horse industry shows off its best, albeit often tortured, horses during a series of horse competitions.
The shows, known as the Tennessee Walking Horse National Celebration, are set in Shelbyville, and this year, COVID-19 notwithstanding, the gates will open and the 82nd annual competition will go on. The shows began Wednesday and will end with the world championship competition on Sept. 5.
Given the pain and suffering to horses that it takes to create the distorted “Big Lick” for which Tennessee walkers have been known since the 1970s, it seems particularly cruel to call this show a “celebration.”
But Marty Irby, a former president of the Tennessee Walking Horse Breeders’ and Exhibitors’ Association and reformed sorer himself, notes that the gruesome games of Ancient Rome were commonly referred to as a celebration, as well.
Irby knows a thing or two about pain and about the practice of soring – the intentional infliction of pain to horses’ legs and feet by applying caustic chemicals such as croton oil, mustard oil and diesel fuel to the skin and inserting sharp objects into the hooves to achieve the artificial high stepping gait known as the “Big Lick.”