Barbaro, revisted (and embalmed)

Granted, we were among the callous neigh-sayers who jumped on the wrong side of the Barbaro hoopla following the champion thoroughbred's untimely passing earlier this week. Honestly, we didn't mean to be mean.

Thank goodness we have very little Photoshop capabillities, or we might have fashioned a picture of a big brown stallion stuffed in this oversized coffin -- like this one we found today at The Onion -- which only perpetuates the unnecessary ridicule over his euthanized horsie corpse.

The surprise was maybe in the overreaction by the nation to his passing. He was more than something genetically bred for the pleasure of human gamblers. He was a brave figure in sports history who happened to put little men on his back and ride them around a track, gladly being whipped along the way.

We'd have taken things even a few hoofs farther, and waxed on about how a horse-drawn carriage would have brought him to his final resting place, where he was carried by 48 pallbearers in his 18-foot long mahogany casket to the strains of Elton John playing "Candle in the Wind."

But we'll allow the writers at the Onion to follow through on that unnecessary deed. Us, we'll just sit quietly and continue to contemplate how much better the world would have been if he'd only been allowed to reproduce.