Over a two-day span (Oct 8th, 9th), NY lost three more racehorses. Aqueduct, which doesn’t begin its winter campaign until November 1st, reports that four-year-old Unbroken Dream “unseated exercise rider – ran loose in barn area hitting stationary object – fx LF leg [and was] euthanized.” At Belmont, Doyouseeme, five, “suffered a fracture to her left front leg while breezing and was euthanized on the track.” And finally, fellow Belmont denizen Roih Jones, who had yet to run a race, died from a “severe left-front hoof infection.” The Empire State, 91 dead and counting.
The Jockey Club trots out its Equine Injury Database at every chance it can to purportedly show the public that they care about the number of horses who die and are tracking them diligently with transparency so they can make changes. If The Jockey Club really wanted to count their dead, they would simply publish the NAMES of the horses in their database so those that do care can look to see if the horses they know died because they raced are on that list and if not, The Jockey Club should be called to task for continuing to deceive the public. Are these horses going to make this infamous list? And by the way: Racehorses that are sent to slaughter are JUST AS DEAD as any listed on their Equine Injury Database but they won’t count those either.
Yes, absolutely, Jo Anne.
If the truth were told, nobody in the industry really cares about the horses. Some may give lip service as to how they care about the horse. But the bottom line is, one can not be part of a business so fundamentally flawed in terms of horse welfare and truly care about these animals.
I believe horseracing embodies all the undesirable traits in humans; greed, ego, cheating, stealing, deceit, and unspeakable cruelty. It attracts the wrong people for all the wrong reasons.