The California Horse Racing Board has disclosed a pair of training kills at Golden Gate on back-to-back mornings: Saturday it was 3-year-old Sweet Boy; Sunday, 4-year-old My Three Kids. 11 horses have now died at California tracks so far this year.
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If killing horses at this rate is considered safe, horseracing must be ended!!!!!!!!!!!!!! There are most likely more casualties of horse racing that were not reported or confirmed as dead at the racetracks!!! The safety protocols that are allegedly in place evidently are not working so well. There is no safety net in place to protect horses from being dumped. Horses are abandoned to starve and suffer miserably! Horses are sent to slaughter! Horses are used and abused by the racing industry and any safety protocols are inadequate to protect horses. This industry is made up of people who use the horses as gambling chips and as meat. People in this industry are selfish and greedy!!! Come on, let’s have foot races with the people in this industry doing the running on the dirt tracks and the turf!
Now that the CHRB has shared this weekend’s Golden Gate Good News (only two kills!), here comes the bad… Public info on poor Sweet Boy has been “updated” to include a “detailed” account of his killing: Sudden Death. How is this bad news? Well, it’s complicated, but I’m feeling exceptionally hostile toward the CHRB and all of Cali horse racing/killing right now, so feel free to skip the diatribe if y’all have heard it before…;)
1. They kinda HAD to put him on their Equine Fatalities List.
Only the DEATHS that occur on track property(!) get recorded in their “scientific database.” Any fatal injury at all will NOT be mentioned, EVER, provided their victim’s heart is still beating as he/she is TRANSPORTED OFF CHRB-LICENSED FACILITY GROUNDS. Too bad for the Stronachs he went and had one of those pesky “sudden deaths” that racehorses are finding so popular these days — couldn’t hustle him off site in time to kill him elsewhere, anonymously.
2. This is a BABY horse that has not raced in more than a YEAR, has a vet-voided claim in his past, has WON most of his “recent” races, but dropped in price overnight from $50,000 to $8,000, and then keeled over dead from a workout 18 months later. Not only did “somebody” know Sweet Boy was NOT all right. EVERYBODY KNEW IT. But he was kept in training ’til they killed him, because that’s how you gotta roll when there’s a HORSE SHORTAGE.
3. Golden Gates’ SECOND victim this weekend, My Three Kids, (presumably) did not suffer a “sudden death.” Which means she DID suffer one or more of the most obscene, gruesome, painful, horrifying and ghastly training injuries that anyone with a modicum of humanity can possibly imagine. If her injuries were anything less than sickening, they’d have, again, taken her elsewhere for “treatment.” (Of course, the CHRB won’t dare publicly reveal any of HER death horror details. Doing so would only hasten the ending of their own careers, which are already plummeting into the toilet faster than the balls of the few old guys who still watch horse racing. Sorry for that, all;)
Thank you, Kelly.
Thank you, Kelly, for telling Sweet Boy’s story.
All these deaths are heartbreaking but when you can see it coming, as was the case with Sweet Boy, it adds a special poignancy. Also, it highlights the irredeemable callousness of all his connections and, of course, the lack of ANY protections for the horse.
And all these horses just dropping dead and treated as though it were not an anomaly is outrageous. Are necropsies performed along with drug screening ?
But this is racing, an out of control self-ruling business and no questions need be answered!
Hi Kelly,
I am trying to figure out the best way to share detailed info like this to Governor Newsome. Have you done this by any chance? I have called his offices before, but I’m not sure if the people answering the phone and taking messages know what it means when I say, ” A two year old horse is a baby horse.” To illustrate the cruelty of deaths and injuries it would be helpful to illustrate with details. Thanks. Christa
Christa, one thing that makes it very clear that the horseracing industry participants know that two-year-old horses are babies is the definition in the DRF, Daily Racing Form. “A Baby Race” is defined as a race for two-year-olds. You might share that with the people you talk to. Thank you for making the effort to communicate with the office of Gavin Newsom, Governor of California.
Thank you, Christa, for making the effort! There’s a lot of great horsepeople (not in racing) in California. The population as a whole, I think, is light years ahead of the other states in abolishing all forms of animal cruelty. I believe horse racing will be legislated out of California first, but I don’t believe it’s through the office of Gov. Newsom that this will be accomplished. By all means, keep contacting him if you will; it certainly won’t hurt our cause. But I haven’t written or tweeted him in more than a year — since he made some strong anti-racing statements during the height of the Santa Anita “Crisis,” then apparently walked them back. (Grrrr: as if any of racing’s horse-killing issues have been resolved since then.)
One thing I do recommend that will help you in researching this topic is to start listening to the CHRB public meetings audio from the past year or so. You will find that MOST of the public speakers are AGAINST RACING, and are truly a wealth of information (and a big pain in the CHRB’s ass:) That should give you a great start, and an idea of what those who’ve been in this fight a lot longer than I have are doing to bring them down.
Then, when you do make these calls, you’ll be armed with some real knowledge about how we can end this cruelty forever:)
I agree with Wanda Diamond