At the Welfare and Safety of Racehorse Summit a panel of experts couldn’t come to a consensus on why average starts per horse and average field size are down.

They did a lot of speculating – trainers work their horses up to a race rather than racing them into condition, trainers only want to run their horse in a race they think they can win because they need to be high-percentage trainers in order to keep owners happy, more time between races is better for horses.

Todd Pletcher, a trainer who is not exactly your average workingman trainer, agreed that horses can take more time between races and get ready through workouts. Everyone knows Pletcher is an extraordinary trainer, but he also gets extraordinary horses and owners who can afford to pay the bills without a second thought.

Someone else offered that once a horse wins a Graded stakes, owners want to retire that horse so they can cash in before their horse turns into Mine That Bird. Mine That Bird won the Kentucky Derby, raced eight more times and won exactly none of those races, although to be fair he did finish second in the Preakness and third in the Belmont.

So that’s great for the owners who have potential breeding stock, but that isn’t most of the owners or most of the male horses racing.

The one thing they couldn’t agree on was the role drug use plays in the health of the thoroughbred.

They panel was made up of highly credentialed people, but there is always a nagging suspicion that if they said, “oh yeah, it’s the drugs,” they might lose their racetrack jobs. Even if it was the drugs, it’s supposed to be the great unspoken. You see, if the people in the know admit drug use is a much wider spread problem, they run the risk of further damaging the industry they want to save. If it is everything but the drugs, then we can work on breeding more horses or something like that.

They other thing they didn’t appear to get into was the difference between the legions of trainers who are scraping by for owners who are scraping by at the dozens of racetracks featuring $5,000 NW2 in the weekday feature race.

I’ll tell you the other thing I didn’t read about. The fact that ownership is down 25% in the last two decades. The fact that the number of foals being born is down 57% since 1986. You think that just might have something to do with the fact that there are fewer racehorses out there to fill a race?

Did you happen to read about the misery the Texas tracks are facing? Handle at Lone Star is down something like 67% from it’s historical high. We had a Breeder’s Cup at Lone Star for goodness sake. The number of race days is  almost half of what it was a few years ago at the Texas tracks. And the problem? They don’t have “instant racing” machines at the tracks. Seriously. It has nothing to do with all the other stuff that is causing racing to slide into the toilet. It’s that they don’t have racing’s version of slot machines.

I was out at my local track the other day and they had a lower level claiming event where the YOUNGEST horse in the field was five and there were two nine year-olds. And it’s just not at my track where they are depending on owners and trainers keeping geldings in training well past their prime.

Sports Illustrated did a long piece this week about Alex Rodriguez and his use of PEDs. One of the things that seems to be the case is that when you use those drugs your body breaks down. It stands to reason that if it happens to humans, it can happen to horses.

I think it is wonderful that horseracing folks get together to talk about this stuff. But if the conclusion is going to be, it’s the trainers and the owners for sure, but we can’t say it’s the drugs, I have a feeling the problem of short fields and low-start horses is only going to get worse.