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

[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.