It didn’t take long. Yesterday was “Opening Day” for Belmont Park’s “Spring Meet” – which will include the third leg of the “Triple Crown” – and a kill to get things started. In the 8th, Baby I’m Perfect was to said to have “sustained an injury at the five-furlong pole.” He was in fact euthanized – dead, at eight.
Over the past three full calendar years (’19-’21) at Belmont, one of American Racing’s crown jewels, 147 kills – that’s a hair under 50 annually. And although yesterday was the first day of racing, horses have been training (and stalled) at Belmont since the first of the year. Baby I’m Perfect is dead-horse #17 in 2022. And all of it, by the way, subsidized by state taxpayers. (If you’d like to learn more about the new bill to strip NY racing of these mammoth subsidies, and how best to advocate for it, please sign up for our webinar “NYS Letters to Legislators” this Monday at 7 pm.)
The NYRA replay, of course, shows none of the injury/ambulance, but there is this:
This abuse and killing of horses must stop. The racing of horses must end!
How is it that the people in this industry of exploiting horses for as much money as possible can say that they have “integrity” and “transparency” when it’s obvious that information is withheld, deleted, hidden, undisclosed, not disclosed by these people? There are the video tapes of horses suffering from fatal injuries, being euthanized on and off the racetrack, dropping dead from being forced to run so hard and fast and long that their bodies are incapable of such extreme exertion while doped, whipped, shocked. As if the abuse & killing of the horses isn’t bad enough and trying to hide it, the mysterious people who call themselves “the blue ribbon nominating committee” of the Horseracing Integrity and Safety Authority refuse to reveal their identity. It is obvious that these despicable people are promoting a dark, underworld sub-culture of criminal activity involving egregious cruelty & abuse of horses.
This whole thing needs to be exposed to show the dark underbelly of organized crime involved in this gambling racket that literally kills horses after abusing them in various ways that they call “normal” but their methods of keeping & exploiting horses is not normal.
As ones who used to gallop horses on the track the video showed many interesting head on views.The horse with the turquoise colored silks is a horse we would NEVER gallop as the view clearly shows very bad conformation & we predict that horse will breakdown sooner than later. Racing such poorly conformed horses, no wonder there`s so many break downs.We would have been greatly concerned with that horse.
That one horse’s way of going was not conducive to any extreme activity such as racing. Horses with that type of winging out or any pronounced conformational defects really put them at a disadvantage for winning besides going lame and breaking down sooner as opposed to later.
In a different video of Quarter Horses being raced on the straightaway (at a different track, different year) there was this one horse that had such faulty conformation in his legs that it was very easy to see, especially in a slow- motion replay.
Wanda, that was very observant. Credit to you for picking that up.
How can you not notice that?
Also the whipping is terrible too! We have never used a whip to teach a horse to gallop ever.Most thoroughbreds are only to happy to gallop for you freely. Some we have taught to ride, even galloped uphill for the 1st time being ridden. We figured Bill wanted to get to the top of the dirt hill trail quicker so he could see all around.Sad to see that whipping is allowed once again in N.J.
Is there no peace for these greatly abused horses. Can their suffering and dying ever be stopped? If I were to do this to my dogs I would be jailed. How do they ever justify this? And we find money into this bullshit. It’s absolutely terrible to watch.
Abhorrent racehorse cruelty that goes on every single damn day!
So obvious to me (with a trained eye) that most of these racehorses are sore and/or tired as they are getting repeatedly beaten.
This is so incredibly disturbing and, as I’ve previously mentioned, the cruelty is a bottomless that is being financially sustained by taxpayer-funded subsidies.
In addition to the subsidies NYRA are leasing these properties for $1 per year and these are properties worth billions if developed and would bring millions into the public coffers.
Instead, they are being leased out to a business that outwardly beats and kills racehorses.
Everybody should be writing, faxing and/or banging on the door of these politicians to turn a light on in their dimly lit brains.
Unfortunately, the newly elected Governor of NY Kathy Hochul is an instrument of horse racing, has attorney friends who owns racehorses and is hell bent on keeping this gambling racket going.
She is no friend of the racehorses.
How to he hell is it that this is still going on in a so called civil society????? Human beings … most of them suck a**. It’s mind boggling the evil of this.What does it say about humans that this bs continues? Give me animals over humans ANY day.