Believe this fervently. There is a significant movement to end horseracing primarily based on a perception it is cruel. The case for cruelty is often made by people who know very little about the sport itself, or by people within horseracing with a specific axe to grind, like the anti-medication crowd. The folks who care about horses and horseracing but believe it should all be natural may unwittingly be helping to fuel the movement to end horseracing. As you’ll see, even a completely drug free sport won’t keep a certain group from working to end racing thoroughbreds.
A Bloomberg View sports writer named Kavitha Davidson recently did an opinion piece calling for the end of horseracing. Davidson article
According to Ms. Davidson
Frankly, it’s a wonder that horse racing has lasted this long. Idealists would point to the sport’s long history in this country and to the unique place horses occupy in the American consciousness. But save for a few big races each year that are ultimately more cultural events and excuses to drink than marquee athletic showcases, the sport has been on a steady decline. And despite its blue-blood reputation, the “sport of kings” is really just the sport of vice, kept afloat by a system of gambling and doping that amounts to institutionalized animal abuse.
Idealists? You mean people who see horseracing as a legitimate sport and an enjoyable form of entertainment? And what is wrong with a few cultural events like the Kentucky Derby or the Breeders Cup to help define and popularize the sport? Only someone completely ignorant of the sport would argue these races are not marquee athletic events. If you watched American Pharoah in full flight in any of the Triple Crown races and concluded he is not an athlete of the highest order, you have no clue what a world class athlete looks like.
I suppose it would be hard to deny that the betting aspect is crucial to the sport’s survival. Of course, we’d never say that betting on games has something to do with the popularity of football. Everybody just tunes in to root on their favorite teams and give sports talk radio and ESPN something to rant about most of the day.
On the other hand suggesting the sport is kept afloat by “doping that amounts to institutionalized animal abuse” misrepresents the fact that most athletes need therapy to be able to play. Every sport, human or equine is to some degree dependent on doctors and pharmacists to keep the participants in the game. It is simply not abuse to treat minor inflammation or a sore muscle with a NSAID, human or equine. Neither should it be illegal in either case.
Eventually though we have to get to Lasix. Davisdon says
The main controversy today is over an anti-bleeding drug known as Lasix. In the U.S., it’s often administered on the day of the race, along with up to 26 other permitted substances; race-day medications are banned in almost every other country. Several top trainers have banded together to push for a plan to ban race-day medications in the U.S., citing the negative effects on the health of the animal and the reputation of the sport. Those resistant to change, including the New York Thoroughbred Horsemen’s Association, claim that injecting drugs is actually good for a horse’s health.
How does someone get the allowances for raceday medication so wrong? Yes, Lasix is administered the day of a race, but none of the other 25 therapeutics is allowed. There are established levels above which trainers receive violations. But this is what racing is up against. People who don’t know enough about the sport to speak knowledgeably, but who have a national platform, proffering plainly wrong information. If someone unfamiliar with the sport reads that paragraph, it sounds like horses are getting 27 drugs before they go out on a racetrack. If that were the case then a lot of us who love racing would abandon the sport.
And one of the biggest problems is that the sport is not make up of all “top trainers” who have nothing but top stock. For every Pletcher or Graham Motion there are a hundred small time trainers training horses few people will ever remember.
The anti-racing crowd says that nothing can fix horseracing, including a Lasix ban, because it is inherently cruel. Davidson writes
Horse racing is inherently cruel, and the problems start, literally, from birth: As the Indianapolis Star’s Gregg Doyel notes, we should expect nothing less than physical breakdown from an animal bred to sustain an abnormally muscular carriage on skinnier-than-usually legs. What you don’t see behind the veil of seersucker and mint juleps are the thousands of horses that collapse under the weight of their science-project bodies. This weekend at Belmont, all eyes on American Pharoah meant nobody was paying attention to Helwan, the 4-year-old French colt who had to be euthanized on the track after breaking his left-front cannon bone. It was Helwan’s first time racing on Lasix.
An abnormally muscular carriage on skinner-than-usually [sic] legs? So does that mean we should be breeding horses with smaller muscles and fatter legs and everything will be fine? Of course not. Ms. Davidson is simply attempting to amplify the idea that racing is broken beyond repair. Between the drugs, the gambling (the horror of it), and the “science-project bodies” there is no rehabilitation for the sport.
Then she plasters on the coup-de-grace. A horse racing on Lasix for the first time breaks down. She doesn’t say that the Lasix caused the breakdown, but that was the implication. Lasix makes horses break down because it allows them to run too fast. Try telling that to a mustang looking to escape from a mountain lion.
She concludes by noting how well other sports have responded to their own drug scourges.
It’s true that abuses and safety concerns exist to varying degrees across all sports. But the more we have learned about health risks in football and hockey, and of performance-enhancing drug use in baseball and cycling, the more we stepped up our efforts to rectify the problems. As football players learn of the game’s long-term health dangers, many rethink their participation. But this exposes racing’s fundamental ill: A horse can’t consent.
So the story is that racing has done nothing to deal with health risks? Racing surfaces today are far more safe than they may have been years ago. Racing jurisdictions have passed limiting rules relating to whipping a horse and have required far more humane riding crops. And I’m not going into detail again about the drug rules in football or baseball as opposed to horse racing. Racing’s rules are draconian compared to these other sports. It’s often pointed out that few football players on a Sunday could pass the same drug test that a thoroughbred has to pass.
Let’s be realistic. No animal can consent to treatment, including your housepet. If that is racing’s fundamental ill, it is humanity’s fundamental ill because we insist on raising animals for food or keeping them as pets. That leaves the humans with some additional responsibility to treat the animal with the right dose of the right drug when that is what is called for. Your infant child can’t consent to treatment either, so we make the decision to medicate for them in their best interest. If that is the standard for horses, and perhaps Lasix aside that is the standard for racing’s therapeutic medications, what more can racing do for the participants? The consent argument is a diversion because humane treatment can ensure animals are not being abused.
Racing has a myriad of problems without adding in the crowd that would go everywhere between truth-stretching and out and out story-telling to kill the sport. If these kind of editorials on the heels of one of the greatest feats a racehorse can achieve gain traction, the sport we love is in more trouble than we believed. We must do three things. First, we must stop airing our dirty laundry in a way that arms the people outside the sport to fight us. We must come to an agreement about how therapeutics, including Lasix, should be used (or not used) in the sport. Second, we have to fight back with our own statistics. Statistics that show horses are not overmedicated, or at the very least that breakdowns are not correlated to the use of therapeutic medications. Third, we must police the people who would use real performance enhancing drugs (not therapeutics, the same way football and baseball do) in a meaningful way. I have written about trainers who have been abused by the system and I will continue to do so, but we must be able to discern between the real cheats and the trainers with picogram positives of therapeutics and treat those real cheats with harsh justice.
We cannot allow the ignorant and those with an anti-horseracing agenda to control the dialogue. Let’s face it – the loss of horseracing would hardly make a ripple with the great majority of Americans, and that means we have to work extra hard to convince the negative and the apathetic to let us solve our problems and make the sport viable in the long term. As the saying goes, if you aren’t part of the solution, you are part of the problem.
