A horse is a pretty big animal, and it’s a good rule of thumb (or rule of bladder) that the bigger the animal, the bigger the bladder, which means the bigger the puddle. In adult humans, the average urine production is 1 to 2 liters per day. Normal urination for a 1,000-pound horse is about 1 to 2 gallons a day. And then there’s the horse’s famously forceful urinary stream-a torrent that could blast rioting demonstrators against a wall!
But this saying may actually have gained currency as the result of the widespread practice of giving racehorses a drug called furosemide prior to a race. Ostensibly a preventive measure for exercise-induced pulmonary hemorrhaging (EPIH), the drug has also been found to have a clear performance-enhancing effect. Why? Probably because furosemide is a diuretic-it makes you piss-and horses given furosemide lose about twenty pounds of their pre-race body weight through urination. And, at the track, lighter means faster.
Horses, by the way, aren’t the only animals in sports subject to chemical cheating. Police in Shanghai, China, recently shut down a gambling den where fighting crickets were given performance-enhancing drugs!
For the hauntingly poetic qualities of horse piss, check out the renowned seventeenth-century Japanese haiku master Matsuo Basho, who wrote the following poem (which appears in his collection Narrow Road to the Deep North):
Bitten by fleas and lice,
I slept in a bed,
a horse pissing all the time by my pillow.
Okay, maybe it loses a little something in the translation.
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"Why do people say, “I have to piss like a racehorse”?" was posted on Friday, October 24th, 2008 at 11:40 am.