I post this in the form of a blog:

“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 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?”

Upon reading this question, my first impulse would be to kick this horse to death, following the logic that one life is worth less than the lives of multiple political prisoners. After thinking about this for a while, I realized that this may not only be false, but the prisoners’ lives may not be in as immediate danger. Also, it comes to mind that many political prisoners are possibly being held for good reason, which sounds unlikely, but can be possible. Another thing to take into consideration is the chance of actually killing the horse while attempting this. If you cannot kill the horse, then it would be senselessly beating a horse until it can probably barely move without any positive outcome. That seems very inhumane.

Now, assuming that all of the political prisoners set to release in this situation will remain alive for a good while, that leans me even more towards the side of not kicking said horse to death. Consider this: if the prisoners remain alive, that gives us more time to get them released in the future, without having to kill anything. Now one might think it is only a horse; does its life matter as much as any humans? Well, I recently found a quote from the cartoon TV show Avatar: The Last Airbender. During the show one of the characters states that “all life is sacred”. Upon thinking about this, I realized that perhaps killing a horse is no different than killing a human, cat or any other animal. Basically, it would make more sense to preserve life as much as possible, and since the prisoners aren’t as prone to death as a horse that is going to be kicked to death is, then it would make more sense to not kill the horse.

There is, however, a good argument towards kicking this hypothetical horse to death is present. After reading up a bit on political prisoners on Wikipedia, I learned that many political prisoners, even here in the U.S. are innocent people who criticized the government, represent a commonly unliked government, or are from a country that is an enemy of the country that arrests them. This makes it very immoral and wrong to hold these people for doing little to nothing to harm anyone. Again, this makes me want to free them, but I also learned that political prisoners only seem to die in captivity after many years, time periods long enough to get them rescued by other means. Either way, the governments of the world will still take political prisoners, so there is no real point in freeing them considering the fact that they’ll either be snatched right back up or replaced by someone else. Virtually, freeing them will have no effect on the number of political prisoners in captivity in the long run, so why bother?

If I do indeed to decide to kick it, despite my obvious negativity about wanting to, would it even be possible? This horse is fully grown, and now matter what type of horse it is, any fully grown horse is really big. It could be possible to kick the horse to death by crushing its ribs, but the problem with this is that that may make it take a bit longer to die instead of say, kick it in the head. If wearing steel toed boots, I could probably barely be able to kick it in the chin, which could eventually kill it, but would 20 minutes be enough to do this? To be totally honest, I think not. It is already a stretch to kick as high as a fully grown horse without steel toed boots, but with them it would just be a plain out struggle, making each kick take longer and longer until I can barely kick it. Though it is certainly possible to get enough good kicks in to kill it, I’m not sure I would want to take that risk, considering I may just leave it brain damaged and unable to do anything at all. This further stretches the argument towards the side of me not kicking the horse to death, but is it really worth it?

Political prisoners tend to be innocent people who just want change in their government, but are they worth kicking a horse to death? Is the U.N., the U.S. or anyone else in the world really doing all they could be doing to get these prisoners released? What if by releasing them all we do is start a war over meddling in other countries government? Could it not be their fate to be prisoners, perhaps sparking some sort of righteous act to negotiate their release changing history as we know it forever? Honestly, I think not only that it would be wise to not aggravate other countries more than we already have and it would probably be more than difficult to accomplish this task either way. I would not kick the horse to death. I feel that I should never take a life, and if others want to, they will pay for it in the long run. In conclusion, it would be better in the now to kick the horse to death, but long term effects are more positive if I don’t, I will let the horse live and let the prisoners try to survive in the confines of wherever they may be situated.