The Names They Came With

When I found him in the newspaper, my horse was called King Solomon.

He was two months old. He weighed almost nothing. He had a name with a crown in it and absolutely no idea, and I knew within about a day that whatever this horse was, he was not a King Solomon.

For a while I was going to call him Ford. His mother was a Mustang and he was, technically, a Pinto, and I was in sixth grade and considered this the finest piece of wordplay ever committed by a human being. In fairness it is still pretty good. It just did not fit him.

What fit him was a Beanie Baby. I was a child of the nineties, I acquired one that came with the name Marshall, and I fell so completely in love with the word that the argument was over. A horse I have now owned for twenty-one years is named after a small stuffed toy I got when I was eleven.

I still have the Beanie Baby. It surfaces every few years in a box during a move, and it makes me smile every single time.

I think about all of this more than I expected to, because since Harvey arrived I have spent a great deal of time reading paperwork, and the paperwork keeps insisting on names that nobody actually uses.

Racing names are jokes their parents made

Harvey is registered as World Chaos. For a long time I assumed that was just a name someone liked.

It is not. His dam is a mare called Harvestfortheworld. His sire is a stallion called Into Mischief. Take the world from one and the mischief from the other and you get chaos, and somebody in a breeding office was pleased with themselves that morning.

Once you notice this you cannot stop noticing it. Thoroughbred names are constrained: eighteen characters, no duplicates of a horse still in use, and every one of them has to be approved. So the people naming them play. They fold the sire and dam together into a pun, or a phrase, or a small private joke, and the result gets stamped onto an animal who will never know about it and carried on official documents for the rest of his life.

Harvey's legal name is a pun about his parents. He answers to Harvey, which nobody wrote down anywhere.

You do not rename a horse

There is a superstition in this world that renaming a horse brings bad luck. Nobody I have asked can tell me where it comes from, or what is supposed to happen to you if you try it, and most horse people observe it anyway.

Harvey came to us already called Harvey, and I was perfectly happy with that. My stepmother was not. She had a replacement ready and she was serious about it: Mr. Darcy.

I could see her point. He is tall and dark and a little reserved until he has decided about you.

But you do not rename a horse, so Harvey he stayed. She has since made her peace with it by deciding he is named for Harvey Specter from Suits, which I have to admit works. A gelding whose legal name is World Chaos, by a stallion called Into Mischief, could plausibly be a very slick attorney.

We have a superstition about the name a horse answers to, and none at all about the one that gets written down.

And the names get reused

Here is the part that genuinely unsettled me.

I went looking for Harvey's race record, the way I keep telling people they should. I searched his registered name in a pedigree database and I found a horse. Dark bay, born 2007, fifteen starts, no wins, a couple of thousand dollars in earnings.

It was not Harvey. It was a completely different animal who happened to hold the same name almost twenty years earlier. Names come back into circulation once a horse is out of production, so "World Chaos" has belonged to at least two horses, and if you go looking casually you will find the wrong one.

I got to the right record because I knew his foaling date and his sire. Someone with less to go on could easily walk away holding another horse's history entirely.

The horses whose names never made it into any system

Marshall's mother was called Baby. She was a mustang, gathered off the range in Nevada and used as a broodmare, and Baby is what she was called by the time she reached me.

Before Marshall she had a filly. They called her Bella, because she was beautiful. She broke her leg in the pasture at a few months old and had to be put down.

I never met her. I was told she looked like Marshall.

The stallion was a paint called Leon, and I have his registration paper somewhere in a box.

Baby and Bella have nothing. No registry, no database, no file I could send you a link to. Two real mares with real names that the record simply does not hold.

What the file says about Marshall

Meanwhile my own horse, the one I have owned for twenty-one years, appears in his veterinary file as a Mustang, colored cremello, born on the first of January.

He is a palomino paint. He was born on the twenty-ninth of July. The January date is an industry convention rather than a mistake, and the color is simply an error that rode along through several moves and ended up on a federal health certificate.

So the official Marshall is a cremello mustang with a made-up birthday. The real one is a palomino paint who was briefly King Solomon and is now, permanently, Marshall.

Why any of this matters

Because a name is the handle you use to find everything else.

If you want a horse's race record, his registration, his health certificates, his old vet files, you look him up by name. And the name in the system is frequently not the name you know him by, is sometimes shared with a different horse entirely, and is occasionally attached to the wrong color and a placeholder birthday.

So write both down. The barn name and the registered name, together, with the foaling date and the microchip number if he has one. It takes one line. I did not do this for years and I got lucky that Harvey came with enough detail to sort it out.

Marshall has no papers to lose. He has me, and a file that describes a horse who does not exist.

Morgan

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Keep reading

The Blank Page Was Mine
Marshall, at 21