The dark side of horse racing, redux

After a longer hiatus than I planned, I'm back on the blog, but with limited input,as I'm increasingly preoccupied with attending to the needs of a close friend who is entering the terminal stage of bone cancer.

What prompts me to leap back into the fray now is today's Times-News glaring front page package on the casino and Downs racetrack, and its celebration of man's inhumanity to equines.I've said this before, so rather than re-invent the wheel, I'm reprinting below my blog from last October on this subject.

It follows:

In yet another puff piece over the weekend celebrating Presque Isle Downs racetrack -a salutary run-down on the abbreviated 25-day first season of horse-racing - the Erie Times-News trumpeted the track’s financial and related successes over the past month, and its potential for even greater gains during next-year’s attenuated 100-day racing season.

“Racetrack’s trial run bodes well for 2008,” the headline blared in Saturday’s online edition. (That was changed in the Sunday edition to “Was track a runaway success?”) It was followed by Reporter Bob Jarzomski’s equally irrepressible lead paragraph: “In horse-racing parlance, Presque Isle Downs and Casino burst out of the gate with a clean break.”

But there was no mention of the Sport of Kings’ tragic darkside, which the local news media have ignored or played down, the cruel and inevitable deaths of some of the noble animals which feed the financial frenzy infecting their owners, promoters, bettors, camp followers and fans. There is reason for concern.

Despite the installation at the Downs of costly artificial Tapeta racing surface designed to reduce traumatic racetrack accidents, at least three horses died here during the 25-day season’s 200 races, injured in mishaps, then “euthanized,” a less than comforting euphemism. That is not an insignificant number for such a truncated season.

But we know very little about how, why or under what circumstances these elegant equines met their demises. The local news media dazzle, indeed overload us with celebratory details festooning casino and racetrack operations: millions of dollars waged; hundreds of thousands paid out; tens of thousands attend; hundred thousand dollar purses won; millions tithed to local governments; tons of local hay utilized; hundreds of hometown cheesecakes and other pastries consumed, ad infinitum, ad nauseum.

But the news media are curiously silent when it comes to downside facts and figures. What exactly happened to the three horses which died or were put down here last month? Did they sustain terminal injuries during training or racing? Or were they barn deaths, perhaps from overdosing? How old were they? Were they too young to tolerate the stresses of competitive racing? Or were their deaths attributable to some imperceptible, as yet unknown, anomaly in the engineering of the new racetrack?

Growing scientific evidence tells us horses bred for racing are too young at two or two 1/2 years - when many of them hit the tracks for the first time, their muscles and structural bones still immature and underdeveloped - to withstand the pace and pounding. Yet overzealous owners, hungry for returns on their high investments in horseflesh, put them out on the tracks before they’re physically ready. Sometimes it pays off. Too often it ends in disaster.

Extrapolated over next year’s projected 100-date season, this year’s fatality rate of thoroughbreds at Presque Isle Downs suggests an increase to at least a dozen horses’s deaths in 2008, perhaps leading as well to some serious jockey injuries, possibly deaths.

It’s usually difficult, even impossible for horse doctors to pin down the cause or causes of equine breakdowns on the tracks, sometimes because they are invisibly rooted in earlier training or racing activities as one or two year-olds, when tiny bone splints or imperceptible hairline fractures arise in their slender, fragile leg bones, silent ticking time bombs lurking there, waiting to explode on the track when they’re three-year old colts, as in the case of the industry’s late and beloved Barbaro.

One influential racing writer, Bill Finley, wrote tellingly in the New York Daily News back in 1993: "The thoroughbred race horse is a genetic mistake. It runs too fast, its frame is too large, and its legs are far too small. As long as mankind demands that it run at high speeds under stressful conditions, horses will die at racetracks."

Nothing, I’m convinced, will dampen the ancient and universal craze for horse racing. Indeed, it seems to be on an implacable upswing everywhere. Richard Abbott, state commissioner of horse racing, told a Times-News reporter recently it’s too early to say the deaths of three horses here in a brief 25-day season sets a pattern or precedent for the coming and ensuing seasons. He was quoted as saying: "Obviously, we're distressed” by the injuries (reluctant, apparently, to use the word “deaths”). “Unfortunately,” he said, “that's a part of the sport."

That doesn’t mean every effort shouldn’t be undertaken to reduce the injuries and deaths to an absolute minimum. For starters, at the very least owners should be required to wait until horses reach physical maturity – at least three years - before putting them on the tracks.

But horse owners and their surrogates won’t go the extra steps to reach that goal unless and until an aroused public outside the racing community demands it. And that’s not going to happen so long as the news media suppress and sugarcoat the ugly realities of horse racing, while glorifying its fantasies.