(no subject)
This is hoped to be a conversation starter. I guess I'm what's called a "lurker" in a lot of communities. I'm a member. I read. I watch. Ocassionally I note. This is my first time posting. I would love to see as much activity in my horse communities as there is in my running and philosophy communities, mainly because horses consume most of my thoughts and time, and because my old body (21) doesn't hold up to much running anymore, and because the philosophy communities lately are a lot of superficial overeducated dribble that has been made deliberately inaccessable to all the lowest common denominators with it's boring and irrelevant analogies, references to authors whom no one with real-world experience and intellect could bear to read, and elitist vocabularies, all of which is done by the writers solely to make themselves feel superior, but really only makes for tedious and affected reading and discussions, and proves via their analogies that they aren't as smart as all their big words are meant to impress upon you, because if they were they would be able to concisely explain what they mean instead of having to compare skunks to apples to algebra, which is easy enough to follow but really detracts from the point.
The point is this: I am a cowboy (no, I don't have sexual identitiy issues; it just seems to me that most "cow-girls" tend to wear sequins and can't ride much, and I am not one of those, and most "equestriennes" tend to wear tights and formalize their riding to the same degree that the "philosophers" do their writing, and I am not one of those either) and don't feel inclined to stand on such ceremonies. I have an extensive vocabulary and education but prefer to just say what I mean in fairly plain terms, while at the same time trying not to sound like a complete hick, and apparently they don't like me for that. I make my living exercise riding at the racetrack (lately, Keeneland, but also The Thoroughbred Center out on Paris Pike (for those familiar with Lexington) where they stick all the trainers without the clout to get permanent stalls at Keeneland's Training Center during the frequent sales that run them off the backside, and previously at The Woodlands (Kansas City, Kansas side) and originally at Arapahoe Park in my home state of Colorado) and I've broken babies for the best and the worst in the world, and I shoe. I also love horses. Many of the horse rescue/animal rights activists and racing fans who have never actually been through the process of training racehorses that I see on these sites might not realize what a juxtaposition that is, but it's true. The racetrack is a bad place for horses. The actually "training" of the horse, mentally, is minimal at best, and most of the tactics used by riders and handlers to get around this disaster-waiting-to-happen once these large, high-strung flight animals are brought to fitness and fed up on "hot" grain is nothing short of abusive. Over half the horses I have galloped in my almost two years at the track have had something physically wrong with them that, in any other discipline, would be grounds to bring charges against any "horseman," if you can call them that, who continued to train on the horse, not to mention being a concern as related to the horse's ability to give it's top performance. There are a number of points I would like to bring up for discussion with anyone reading this who has an opinion:
cross-posted
Contributing factors to the number of breakdowns seen on the track:
1. The breeding industry. Most people don't know that the horseracing they see on TV isn't really about horseracing. In fact, few horsemen outside the racetrack know that, in the Thoroughbred industry, the money is all in breeding. What you see on TV is just the glory. The purses are a drop in the bucket. All the real money is exchanged trying to attain that glory. Trainers don't, for the most part, make their money in purses. They make it in training fees paid to them by owners. Of course, the more races they win, the richer the owners they attract, and theoretically the better horses they get to train, but the fact is that you lose at least 90% of the races you enter. Your bread and butter comes straight from the owners' wallets. But the most profitable things to be are breeders, either pimping stallions for ungodly sums, or raising foals for the yearling sales each spring. The money is in the sales. In selling the highest priced yearlings possible. So what do you do? You breed to the stallion that has the most market appeal you can afford, not the one that is the best cross for your mare. And definitely not the one with the best legs, nor the one with the history of producing foals with the best legs. The most highly coveted foals are the ones whose sires produce the highest earning runners. Breakdown rates are not listed in the sire listings. Neither are conformational defects that will predispose a horse to injury. Stakes winners and earnings are. Price is decided, roughly, 65% by breeding, 30% by what the horse looks like above the knee, and 5% by what the horse looks like from the knee down. I believe, and I'm sure some fan will correct me if I'm wrong, that it was A.P.Indy who underwent total reconstructive knee surgery, both legs, as a yearling so that they could even feasibly get him to the track. He ran well. Traditionally, the first year sires who won the most money on the track attract the owners of the best mares, and therefore have the best odds of producing the best foals. This is what happened for A.P.Indy. And his foals ran well. Today he is a leading sire, and his sons and daughters are going on to the breeding shed. What do you think the legs on this whole line of horses look like? More expensive horses usually go to better trainers and so have a better chance at getting the care they need to stay sound, so this is going largely unnoticed. But after enough generations of this trait being passed along, these horses will find their way into the hands of greedy unscrupulous and/or ignorant trainers and their below average exercise riders, and do you know what will happen to them there? Use your imagination. I am going to point out something that seems extremely obvious to me, but apparently breeders miss it completely, or else ignore it because once the foal is sold and the millions are in their pockets, they just don't care anymore about the fact that a horse is an extremely large animal. They are very, very strong, and running around on legs about the same size as ours. Now, it seems to me that if any particular joint does not have the ideal alignment, the longer the bones of said joint are, the more leverage will be applied. The more weight placed on said lever, the more force/torque/pressure will be placed on said joint. Yet the popularity of big strapping colts remains. So breeders keep trying to grow their foals bigger and bigger, breeding the fastest horses to the fastest horses, who will inherrently place the greatest forces on their legs (momentum=massxvelocitysquared) and yet give no thought to the structures that will have to hold up and carry all of this glorious speed, power, musclemass...Their only thought is for who will be the fastest. Too bad they aren't breeding trains, who have no emotions or physical sensations at all, and can in fact be continuously reengineered to be bigger faster stronger. In horses we are overlooking the stronger part, and this is a ghastly mistake. Any engineer will tell you that everything has a structural limit. A maximum load capacity. And when you surpass a structure's ability to accomodate your demands, it breaks. Even the perfect horse has this critical point, and over the last few thousand years of selectively breeding for speed, we have come quite close to it. The problem is, that most horses are not running around on perfect legs. There have been many articles since the news of Marion Jones' doping regarding physiological capacity and why after the year 2023, there will be no more world records (without drugs, which tend to lead to former star athletes inexplicably dropping dead at the age of 34) Having reached a point extremely close to the horse's physiological capacity, perhaps it is time to begin breeding for soundness instead of speed, so that we may continue to enjoy this sport and the horses may continue to enjoy being alive. They simply cannot be made to be much faster and by continuing to press that limit we only ensure the continued degradation of the sport and the animals. Want to see another Secretariat? Focus on soundness, because a lot of horses out there have got the stuff and will never get to show it otherwise.
2. Horsekeeping practices. This is probably the most freakishly insane thing I have noted at the track and in the industry, and if you grew up in Kentucky you probably take it for granted that this is just the way things are done. First of all, they want horses born early in the year, like January or February, in hope that the horse will have the maximum possible level of physical maturity by the time it is of racing age in order to compete against horses that might be a few months younger. This insures, in many cases, depending upon the weather, that the horse will live exclusively in a stall for the first several weeks of it's life, a time critical for developing connective tissues and especially the all-important internal structures of the foot, which can only be done by moving out freely, preferably over some pretty hard ground. The horse, even if it ends up straight which is very unlikely, is already at a disadvantage. Once spring arrives the horse enters what will be the best days of his life. His only days of freedom, unless he is fortunate enough to get laid up with an injury and turned out, are as a foal and weanling. When the spring yearling sales approach, which coincide timing-wise with a vital period in the development of the horse's social skills, turnout time is greatly reduced or eliminated to prevent the horse from getting any nicks, dings or scratches that might negatively affect his price. Colts will never be turned out with company again, just as they reach the age where they crave it, not always sexually, (though this can easily be acheived via the hormone shots all the coming-yearlings get to maximize their growth) but simply to rough-house with others like them whichs helps them to learn equine etiquette. Can't take a chance on them seriously injuring one another. (Highly unlikely.) They instead get fed high-protein diets and placed daily into an automatic horse-walker (think: moving cells or cubicles) to be jogged and fattened for the sales. After the sales they are turned out in individual pens until breaking season arrives, at which point they seek their rough-housing with the unfortunate trainer or rider assigned him. During this first year of life, the horse has been handled daily, stalled nightly, and learned absolutely nothing that will do him a bit of good. They learn how to be calm when trapped in a stall where they are utterly defenseless against any threat natural to a horse. They learn that, whenever a human has hold of you in any way, you cannot escape whatever indignity he may try to do you, and your best best is to freeze, trancelike, until it's over. Many who still retain enough of the wild, free-spirit we so admire them for who cannot submit themselves in this way, learn to either run over the top of some hapless groom, or to run backward from the threat, which eventually leads to flipping over backward, and, confusingly, rather than being killed and eaten for going to the ground, freedom. Inherrently, the worst problems I have noted in breaking babies raised Kentucky-style have been balking, because he thinks he can't move forward while I've got hold of him unless I'm leading him, flipping, because it's his only remaining escape option, and laying all over my hand when steering or stopping, seen most often in the colts with the most desire to play with you or run you over. You don't really get the time to teach the things the grooms (cheap Mexicans or mentally-impaired white people) should have been doing all along, like respecting personal space, giving to pressure, move your hindquarters and forequarters seperately, back up, moving forward on your own as when going through a gate... After all, these now strapping yearlings have been handled every day since they hit ground, and, as the trend will be set throughout their lives, their education has been minimal at best. When they have been broken "sufficiently" to move them to the track (often before the turn of the new years when they officially turn two, regardless of whether they were born in January or June) it is typically all downhill. The seeming chaos of the track triggers panic in horses, flight animals to begin with who have been bred and raised to have a maximal flight response, while never being taught to trust a human to acknowledge their fear and see them safely through it, nor to stop or steer, is often disastrous. The bigger and fitter they get, typically the more numb and robotic they get to their surroundings, trying simply to finish their workout as quickly as possible, much to the dismay of riders a tenth their size, and occassionally just snap, coming completely unglued over some unusual or mundane perceiveed threat. A horse you want to be confident and competitive, and often percieve by his robotickness to have acheived, is really just afraid. Afraid of the stick. Afraid of the reins. Afraid of whatever is scaring all those other horses to make them run so fast, and scared of the fact that I'm being restrained even though I know the slowest horse gets eaten, and conditioned to be numb to all of it and unconditionally obedient. And the ones who aren't, the ones who have the most natural horse behavior left in them, are the ones who get accused of being stupid every day of their lives. You do nothing but feed them, fit them, and train them to run, and the whole training process after that is one constant invalidation of their desire to do so. And you wonder why they are "tough" and angry and unruly, and why they are so hard on themselves physically. Because you wont let them be the selves you've conceived and raised them to be! Because you never gave them a chance to be what they are, which are HORSES! Because you lock them in a stall 23 hours a day, feed them for maximal energy output, and seek only to hold them back. Ironic that the very things that captivate us most about these animals, their power, their free-spiritedness, their beauty, and above all their speed, which has allowed them to survive all these eons, epitomized in the momentary glory of racing, are the very things most opressed by the very process of preparation that makes up 95% of the sport.
3. Track surfaces and shoeing practices. Tracks are banked toward the rail for drainage purposes. A horse with both legs the same length will inherrently place more pressure on the leg on the higher part of the bank. In America, where we always train in boring dum-dum circles in the same direction day in and day out, this is the right leg. However gradual, subtle or even imperceptible (from our blissfully ignorant viewpoint) the grade may be, the repetition does eventually tire and weaken the overused structures (to say nothing of how dulling and frustrating it is to horses' minds.) Has no one considered this given the ratio of right-leg-breakdowns to left-leg-breakdowns? I don't know that the "hard" dirt surfaces themselves are causing problems; the polytrack movement, although extremely well-intended, is geared more toward treating the symptoms of all the points I will mention than the problems themselves. I think it has been primarily beneficial for the horses because of the drastic reduction of injuries, both catastrophic and otherwise, BUT, long-term, it may prove ineffective because it will simply enable trainers to train even harder before seeing the same effects they would see otherwise on a less forgiving surface. It just may take awhile for this to develop. Furthermore, the rebounding properties of the surface, while they do make it easier on overloaded front-ends, seem to cause a lot of comparatively minor hind-end discomfort (galloping horses land-hind-feet first), usually spinal or hock, because of the concussive impact simply being sent back up the leg, which must then be absorbed somehwere in the body. If repetitive impact leading to bone injury is the big worry, a movement toward a surface that simply absorbs/deadens it without sending it back up would be preferable. Think sand, wood chips, or soft turf. The problem you then run across is that the horse must work harder to move itself and you now have an increased instance of connective tissue injury instead. In my opinion, the hard dirt surfaces are preferable because they will show the ill-effects of bad training the soonest, and lead to the soundest possible horses amongst the few good trainers, but if no one else is going to change their training practices then the polytrack is probably the best compromise. Leaning toward the ideal of the self-sufficient horse, the best way to combat "surface" problems would be to let the horse go barefoot. Horses are shod for several reasons, among them: 1)To protect tender soles. 2)To prevent horses from wearing their hooves down to the point that they have nothing left to walk on. 3)To hold together hoof walls that aren't worth a fuck. 4)"Support" 5)For traction. 6)Because it's always been done. There are several problems with traditional shoeing, as there are with most "traditional" horsekeeping practices, namely that the way humans do things is directly oppositional to the way horses are made to live and work. First of all, the hoof is NOT a rigid structure. The hoof wall, particularly in the quarters (where nails go) and heels needs to be able to move up to one inch both vertically when the horse banks itself in tight turns and horizontally during every weight-bearing phase of every step the animal ever takes. Steel and aluminum shoes, being rigid, and, in the racing world, applied extremely tightly, do not allow this, and therefore do not allow the hoof to properly absorb concussion, thus leaving it to be done by joints not made for it, and also negatively effect circulation in the hoof and therefore the growth and overall health, both by preventing flexion of the wall and by elevating the frog (by the thichness of the shoe) to the point that it is no longer able to make ground contact. I can already hear the howling. What about tender-soled horses? What about hoof wear? What about weak walls and crushed or underrun heels? Tender soles would not be such a problem if horses hadn't been selectively bred for thousands of years to not be worth a fuck. That is to say, bred for our purposes rather than for soundness. Show me a wild horse that is crooked or tender-soled and I will show you coyote bait. Natural selection. Tender soles would not be such a problem if horses were not kept constantly shod rather than given a chance to toughen them by being gently worked, gradually brought to fitness, and turned out on suitable ground in their natural state, which is barefoot. Unfortunately, what's been done for thousands of years is done, and we only have the results to work with, not the ideal. Many horses, given a chance, will be prefectly fine barefoot or in front shoes only, especially given the highly maintained surfaces they are provided to work on. Furthermore, great strides have been made in recent years to produce functional synthetic shoes. These will flex with the foot, allowing it to function more like it would in it's natural state while providing sole protection and frog support. This is extremely important and the traditional ways of shoeing compromise it greatly, which is a great contributer to thin, weak, brittle hoof walls, crushed and underrun heels, thrush, seedy-toe, and inadequate hoof growth per wear. All of this last list of problems, by the way, are due to the poor circulation caused by rigid shoes. If you do not have some understanding of the internal structures of the hoof and how they work to absorb shock and affect circulation then this will probably be over your head, but if your shoer is worth what you are paying him he should be able to explain this to you and the contradiction between what the hoof wants and needs and what shoes do will be quickly evident. Furthermore, steel and especially aluminum have actually been shown to exponentially increase the shock to the horse's leg with each stride. And finally, if it is traction that concerns you, a particular brand of synthetic shoe has been engineered to allow the placement of studs, but truthfully traction has mainly negative effects on the horse's leg. This can be particularly noted in the shearing forces placed on the leg by toe grabs, a leading contributer to bucked shins, chipped knees and quarter cracks, and also on small "bullring" tracks, because a horse when turning needs to have some slippage to avoid putting torque on structures only made to go front to back, such as the fetlock, a perfect hinge joint, another example of why the wall needs to be able to move. If you must, put studs in your synthetic shoes only on race day, or have the horse put in aluminums (nothing more severe than queens plates on two-year-olds (if you insist upon running them at that age) and nothing more severe than level-grips on three-year-olds, and never ever the "louisiana toe grabs" seen on many quarter horses) a few days before racing and pull them off immediately after. Believe me, this is compromise enough to your horse.
4. Breaking horses too young, specifically as YEARLINGS!! when their bone structure is not mature until the age of SIX!! Apparently all the multi-million dollar horse farms in this multi-billion dollar industry can't afford to feed their horses for an extra year before seeing a return on the investment. In the racing industry, horses are broken in October or November of their yearling season. They will probably not be racing until the same time the following year. A sound horse (provided you like horses better than money and can therefore keep him that way) can be brought from pasture turnout to racing form in three to four months. Rather than waiting on these babies until June of their two-year-old year, letting them mature an extra seven months before putting weight and pressure on them and having them ready to run in September or October, the same time they would be anyway, they instead break them long before their bodies are ready (many are still not ready in June) and let immature structures endure training for a full year. This might be justifiable if this time was spent giving these horses a solid educational foundation, getting their ground manners, getting them to trust and respect a rider, getting them flexing, bending, collecting, extending, elevating the forehand, elevating the back, giving to the bit, following your hand, not dropping the shoulder, so on and so forth, and above all, CROSS-TRAINING to develop bones and connective tissues to have some sort of lateral stability in order to head of the number of spiral fractures seen due to a slight bump, bobble or misstep on the track, but it's not. They are "broken" just to the point that hopefully an average rider can stay on them, which is often not the case, and then they are "conditioned." This is "training" to these people. Some think it does their mind good to "just be around the track," "see the sights," like this will keep them from coming unglued later, when they're fit and grained up, even though they never learned to trust their rider's judgement in moments of fear. The only excuse for doing things this way is the fact that competent help is hard to come by, and they want to make sure the horses are "good and broke" before they get big and strong enough to do any real damage, thus raising the fees for workman's comp insurance. Typically it is a bunch of cheap labor (Mexicans) who couldn't make better money for less work anywhere else in their country or ours, who really don't know a fucking thing about horse psychology or the life that animal would choose for itself if allowed, and for the most part the trainers are equally thoughtless. The horses are simply a means. The more athletic Mexicans work their way up to exercise riding, compounding the problems of soundness (because none of them know how a horse ought to go, and the ones who do learn it to a small degree leave no room for an individual animal's way of compensating for his own conformation, and understand that most of them don't even care enough to try to learn; they just collect their ten dollars and tell the trainer "he went good," or "he pulled hard") and saneness (because, let's face it, if you don't know what the horse is thinking and feeling when you're a hotwalker, you're much more inclined to panic when the same situation occurs on his back, grabbing the reins and getting in his face, which will lead to one of two things: the horse flips over backward or the horse runs off because that is all it knows how to do with pressure in it's mouth.) Many horses do not see their three-year-old season. But on the bright side, if you win the Breeder's Cup Juvenile and never race again, you can stil stand at stud for the next 20 years of your life for $50k per ejaculation (there is no artificial insemination in registered Thoroughbreds) Unfortunately, only one colt per year gets to achieve this out of many thousands born.
5. Racing horses too young. Juvenile (2-year-old) races are where all the pressure is at because then breeder's can justify hiking the stud fees for their freshman sires. Personally, I'd rather breed to something that will throw a foal with some longevity, who will win races when it's six or seven and still be worth a shit for something when it retires from the track, because honestly, most horses just aren't good enough to justify breeding them, including many of the ones that get bred anyway.
6. Overtraining. I really don't get this. Seriously, how stupid do you have to be to do this? The horse is tired. Train through it and he'll be stronger, assuming of course that the colt bought for half a million dollars as a yearling doesn't hurt himself trying to compensate for muscle fatigue with his bones and connective tissues. And assuming he doesn't start "bleeding" (Exercise Induced Pulmonary Hemorrage) from the exertion and/or the tension stemming from anxiety about being forced to go to the track when he doesn't really feel up to it. The horse is sore. You assume "body-sore" (in his muscles, i.e. lactic acid buildup) because you can't find heat or swelling in his legs nor sesitivity in his feet, but then, the horse can't tell you for sure, can he? So you train through it based on the logic that all that time spent resting in his stall the other 23 hours of the day will aid in rebuilding those muscles (it is muscle-soreness, right?) so they end up even bigger and stronger than they were before(as opposed to letting him rebuild from the initial soreness which may or may not have been in his muscles??) So now you have even more mass to carry around on the same (sore?) legs and hooves, on an animal that, through thousands of years of selective breeding and many months of growth hormones, is already dangerously close to it's structural and physiological capacity for speed. By all means, push him a little further; he's cheap. Fucking idiots.
7. Overracing and training yearround. Regardless of whether the thing is sound or falling apart, if you, the trainer, think you can hold him together for one more race, then keep him up and running by any means necessary, because the owners definitely wont be happy about having to feed him for the course of a layoff during which time he wont be earning anything (as if he'll earn to his full potential running crippled) and then have to wait (and pay you) for an additional three-four months while he is brought back to racing form. All these animals are cheap and replacable, so the bottom line is to make as much money with them as possible right now this very second. It's cheaper to replace him than it is to invest more money in him over a period of time that will allow him to unltimately win more races and more money. The expense isn't worth the payoff. You think the amount it costs you to have a racehorse to begin with justifies running him twelve months out of the year? Bullshit. If you have that kind of money in the first place you need to lay him off three months every winter for "horse time", lame or not, take the time getting him ready (mainly mentally), and run him half as much. If you can't afford to do that, then you can't afford the horse. Period. Contrary to what you think, this doesn't cost you a fucking penny more than it would otherwise because the racing end of this business is mainly throwing money away (for both owners and bettors)on the gamble anyway. On the vet bills, on the entry and jockey and training fees for races you don't win, on more vet bills trying to hold him together. If you lay him off, at least he'll win those races he does run because he'll be sound and not sour. (Flashbacks to a Military colt who stopped, and I mean STOPPED, in the middle of a breeze one day because I turned my stick up, as I'd been instructed to do. Good thing I'm not a cow-girl or equetrienne or I would have let that horse find his own way home.) Do the right fucking thing. For the horse, not for your pocketbook. Give the horse a chance to do himself justice.
All of which lead to:
8. Training on sore horses. It's official. Your vet has diagnosed a suspensory strain, a strain of the sesamoidian ligaments, an ineffectual bone chip in the knee or ankle, osselets, ringbone, a problem with a flexor tendon, or my personal favorite "footsoreness" (usually navicular or pedal osteitis but frequently sidebone, a crushed digital cushion, the beginnings of a quarter crack, or damage to the sensitive laminae, diagnosed as "a bruise" or, more accurately though equally unalarmingly "repetitive impact" soreness)(Those X-rays are just far too costly!) What do you do? Give him time off to heal? Consider retirement or an alternative career? Nah! Give him some Bute and keep after it! Even when the horse's attitude and behavior begin to decline (what's that Lassie? Timmy's stuck in a well?) the answer is more drugs. Usually Ace, a tranquilizer, not race legal, and will test if given within 48 hours, but enough to make angry, unruly horses controllable (as opposed to listening to what they're trying to tell you and addressing it) so that you can safely train them to have them "fit" to run. What a joke.
and
9. Racing sore horses. Hooray for equine pharmaceutical companies making this possible! And legal! Hooray for Bute (horse aspirin) which, as applied in the racing industry (daily, and in doses directly proportionate to the severity of the horse's problem, to allow hurt horses to keep training and even racing(!!!) without raising any eyebrows amongst activists in the stands) often leads to ulcers. Like gut problems (colic) aren't enough of a problem given the average diet of a racehorse. Hooray for Banamine, a muscle relaxant used to aid horses who "tie-up" (which to me has always seemed like cramping after a run, though I'm told with no satisfactory explanation that it's different in horses) and in some who bleed, so that trainers may continue running "psycho horses" (the cause of which is highly debateable)(note the high percentage of horses on Banamine flipping in the gate) without addressing the cause of the horse's anxiety (usually fear, or pain, or fear of pain) and/or getting the horse feeling relaxed and secure about it's job and life, or addressing dietary changes (think electrolyte imbalances) that might aid muscle function. Hooray for Lasix, given to all horses suspected of bleeding (those scopes are just far too costly, and, when they come up negative, it's just far too difficult to figure out why ELSE the horse might not have given his best performance) so that instead of getting him relaxed and travelling well in training on a consistent basis, and instead of schooling him until he is reassured about his anxieties, you can just give him a drug and continue to train with him holding his breath or roaring because he's all bound up, particularly in the chest/windpipe/ribcage(think: lungs) area. Note also, how horses who run on Lasix almost never run without also being on bute. Can't let him travel in training when he's already sore. If you insist upon training him, you can't possibly throw him his head and let him compensate for his own faults and injuries. Nope, gotta impede him to keep him from hurting himself any worse. Gotta hold him together to see if we can win some money in one more race, when the horse's performance cannot be reasonably expected to come anything close to doing him justice. And well, if he's that bad we'll just run him cheap, against totally inferior horses who will beat him anyway because he's depressed and scared and angry, and above all, HURT! Does anyone ever think that if you didn't fuck them up from the get-go, the horse might be smart enough not to hurt ITSELF? Might not be so "conditioned" to run through pain and so scared of STOPPING because of what riders do to balky horses that she might just trust you enough to listen when you tell her not to run off with half her leg flapping by a shred of hide?!! (Go For Wand)
Which ultimately lead to:
BREAKDOWNS!
Not all are catastrophic. Not all are even career ending. But very, very few are not preventable, and all of them cause pain, sometimes crippling, and sometimes even death to innocent animals that don't deserve it. Innocent animals who give us everything of themselves, even the parts that we should know better than to take. They are kind enough to let us do this to them, but God knows why. If I was as big and strong as a horse, I wouldn't let you strap a saddle to my back and ride me and pull me around with a piece of metal in my mouth and all manner of tie-downs. Even at my current size (jockey) you would have a hell of a time getting it done. There are those rare instances where a good trainer enters a perfectly straight, sound animal at the top of it's game and for seemingly no reason at all, maybe a crooked break, maybe some slight bump with another horse during the race, maybe crossing the hump where the chute enters the main track, or as the result of any of a thousand other speculations, the horse snaps a leg off. (I am referring of course to the immortal Ruffian, who had had a hairline fracture early in her training that had never caused an issue after the trainer addressed the problem and let it heal completely) These are rare and tragic. Even more tragic is the widely held belief amongst racetrackers that, if it's going to happen sometimes anyway in spite of your best efforts, you may as well not waste the effort. Or expense. They'd rather take the loss. And that uncaring, underachieving attitude results in the sickening display that is modern american racing. The staggering numbers of breakdowns in horses who had something wrong with them before stepping into the paddock on race day, problems which the trainers were fully aware of, whose feed was just too expensive for owners who can afford them to begin with to lay them off until they were better. Horses who could have been easily saved. Horses who could have been sold for a few hundred bucks to be somebody's pasture ornament, and been happy, who instead were killed for the chance at running out a few thousand more dollars at the end of a quarter-million dollar career spread over six years. Or multi-million-dollar horses killed at the age of three for a chance at one more race that would have allowed them to stand for 750k instead of 500k if that leg would have made it another mile. You don't see it from the rail or the grandstands or on the simulcast screen behind the betting windows. You probably didn't even see it sitting in your own living room during warm-ups the day Barbaro broke down. All you see are the glory and the tragedy. You don't see the elaborate amounts of bullshit that go in to actually getting it done. Into actually killing Kentucky Derby winners. That horse could have never started again if it was found that he had a problem and still stood for half a million just for winning that one race and coming into it undefeated. Are you telling me that there is that much pressure for a Triple Crown winner that trainers and owners alike are willing to throw away that kind of money, to say nothing of the horse, but THE FUCKING MONEY and potential for more money that has been driving this whole disgusting scene all along right out the window? I guess that's why they call it gambling. It's just that, when I fell in love with racing at age 11, I still held the ideal that we were gambling on which horse was fastest, not on whether the favorite's leg would hold up until the wire.
Would Barbaro have preferred to take the loss? I know it's all noble the degree they went to trying to save him, but think of what that horse had to suffer in the process because some millionaire hoped to become a billionaire off of his sperm. The next time you see a horse break down, think about this: there is a 98% chance that someone, somehwere in that horses life-off-screen, knew that something might have been wrong, and was either too uncaring, too selfish, or too fearful of job-loss to open their mouth.
I know there has been some outcry of late about the retirement of perfectly healthy horses at the age of three, before they have even been allowed to peak physically at the task they were bred for. I have two things to say. First is that, as I have already mentioned, he was not, in fact, bred to win races. He was bred to win just enough races to justify standing him at stud, which is vastly more profitable. Second is that many of the horses you see disappear just when you're getting excited about their four-year old season, are anything but "perfectly healthy" and the owners are simply protecting their investment in him as a stallion rather than continuing to risk him on the track. As for the few that are sound after being exploited at the equivalent age of an eight-year-old child, it is disappointing to the fans, which racing desperately needs, but maybe, given the sickening nature of the industry, it is the best thing for the horse?
As a side note, I think I am going to put a big sign on the right side of my truck reading: "You know you're from Kentucky when you can't merge with the only other car on the road."