They shoot horses, don't they?

[rhu]

In all the media coverage about Eight Belles's tragic end at the Kentucky Derby, I've been struck by the following: On WGBH radio, James Carroll compared it to the destruction of an artistic masterpiece; in the New York Times there was an article that described the horses as racing's most valuable asset.

Completely lost seems to be the fact that animals are dying painfully for the sake of human entertainment. Oh, not as directly and certainly as Michael Vick's dogs, perhaps, but inevitably as these horses are bred and raced with regard primarily for victory rather than for the safety of the animals.

I'm not a vegetarian. I'm not an animal rights activist. There are times when an animal's death serves a legitimate human purpose. If canaries dying in mines saved miners' lives, that's a worthwhile tradeoff.

But what's going on in horse racing disgusts me.

Comments

[vettecat.livejournal.com]

I don't think it's quite that simple. As a lapsed horse-ophile, I was following the debate around this very closely. It has been pointed out that left to themselves, horses will race each other for enjoyment, even to the point of injuring themselves. They love to run. So it's not a case of forcing the horse to do something so much as building a structure around it. The injury was tragic, but she could have done that running alone in a field, too. And then she would have been lying there and suffering for days.

[pocketnaomi.livejournal.com]

The human-caused problem isn't that horses run, it's that they've been systematically bred for a frame which carries as little weight as possible on a physique which can put tremendous force into each stride. That's the way you get sprinters, and despite the most famous races being comparatively long ones, everyone breeds for sprinters -- it's where most day-to-day races are, so it's where the ordinary money is, and you can't create a breeding program around the off-chance of getting one of the exceptional horses. So what you've got is a whole breed which is made to be able to run faster and harder than its leg bones can support, and they shatter.

This has somewhat been changing, due to disgust within as well as outside the racing industry. It's too soon to know what sort of results we'll see. It may be that nobody's dared go far enough from the original model, or their in-between generations would lose a whole lot of races. But it may also be that we'll get a stockier, less damage-prone breed of racehorses... it'll just take a while. Can't tell yet.

[vettecat.livejournal.com]

Ah, OK... that's another issue. Similar to dog breeds that have been bred to have such short noses that they have trouble breathing.

[pocketnaomi.livejournal.com]

Racehorse breeding got somewhat better about this in the early 1990's, after Go for Wand broke down in the Breeder's Cup. It's still too early to be able to tell fully whether they're making progress on breeding more for strength and solidity and less for light speed at the expense of bones that can hold up to it -- Eight Belles' collapse is probably somewhere between two and five generations from that time, depending on exactly when in her ancestors' breeding careers her line came. But the trend is at least there, in the same way that competitive gymnastics eventually trended toward older, more physically mature athletes out of everyone's sheer disgust at how screwed-up the previous patterns were making the children who competed.

[michelel72.livejournal.com]

Thank you.

[rubrick.livejournal.com]

Of course, as has been pointed out, this sort of thing is hardly limited to non-human sports participants.

[530nm330hz.livejournal.com]

Granted, but I don't think I've seen media commentary along the lines of "When a twenty-year old cheerleader dies in competition, it's like seeing a Michaelangelo painting destroyed." That's the sort of comment that I kept reading and hearing after the Kentucky Derby, and that's what really got me upset.

[rubrick.livejournal.com]

I agree wholeheartedly-- though "Jones is being traded to Atlanta" has always struck me as rather peculiar.