In an original act of activism, Facundo Palomino, accompanied by his girlfriend Ailin Jeanney, pulled a cart for 20 km in the forests of Ezeiza, located just under 6 km from Argentina’s Ministro Pistarini International Airport, to show the suffering of horses forced to work in the country transporting people or goods in what is known as “blood traction”. The event was also a tribute to the horse Atlas, who died as a result of his forced labour.
Both activists are high-performance athletes and vegans by conviction, and Facundo has been so for more than a decade. On February 22nd, 2017, Palomino met Atlas, a survivor of the cruelty of blood traction, when he saw him at an animal sanctuary in General Rodríguez, where he was recovering from a terrible accident in which a vehicle crashed into the car he was dragging, fracturing his leg. During his action to honour him, Palomino told Infobae, “Atlas died from the consequences of the work to which he was subjected, and so that what he suffered is not in vain. I wanted to show what all these horses suffer . . . I’m going to use my own body to show what horses go through.”
The activists, supported by Secretary of Animal Protection and Welfare Carolina Basso, and Mayor Gastón Granados (who ran a kilometre next to the athletes), turned the challenge into a call to collective conscience.
At the end of his feat, Palomino said, “I’m here because I chose it, but they don’t choose their destiny. It’s up to us to change it… Although I was in pain, a little bit in my back and neck too, because of how uncomfortable it was to carry it, I think about horses and it’s terrible. For me, as an experience that I wanted to do, now I see that I lacked better equipment, so the next one I will put it together better. I admit that I armed myself with elements quite improvised by me and, obviously, I felt the weight of the car on my neck and waist, but it was bearable even though it was heavy and my body hurt. When we repeat it, it will be with a more pro team and greater distance.”
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