Sunday, The Maine Monitor published a piece on that state’s harness industry. It’s good work, and I encourage you to take a look (and not just because I am quoted in it). As usual, the other side gives us plenty of fodder. A couple highlights:
Racing Commission board member and chairman of the local chapter of the U.S. Trotting Association (i.e., a racer insider) Don Marean: “We, the industry, are supporting and regulating, and governing ourselves with our own money.”
Not true, of course. The racing in Maine, like most other states, is being subsidized by the casino located at Bangor Raceway.
Then this on “aftercare” and the giant elephant in the room – slaughter: “Marean said the Maine Harness Horsemen’s Association, an organization representing owners, breeders, trainers and drivers of standardbred horses in Maine, allocates $5,000 annually to help care for [retired] horses.” Imagine that. As most of you know, $5,000 barely covers (if it does at all) the annual cost of care for one horse. Last year, the article notes, 669 horses raced in Maine. These people are disgusting.
Thank You HRW for exposing their constant LIES, their depraved indifference and neglect — their cruelty — to the Horses — time to SHUT DOWN this vile industry whose ONLY interest is self-serving and paying their own salaries
It’s a business. The horses are not pets.
If the horses are not productive in the way that the people in this industry want the horses to be productive, they sell them for whatever they can get out of them.
Oops! I mean, they get the best of everything.
(How could anyone not see through this b*******?)
I love how the racing industry — via the racing press, of course — works so hard to pretend that Aftercare has become their “priority.” This post is a perfect example of their slithering deceptions: as if they actually WANT equine survivors, when each and every horse comes with an additional $100k + price tag for lifetime care.
Too bad for them, their attempts to Grow the Game are stymied when folks find out how readily (and WHY) racing chews up and spits out baby horses.
Right? That’s just embarrassing, even by racing’s (rock-bottom) standards:
“As the generous and thoughtful benefactors we are, we bestow upon thee…HALF a bale of high-quality hay. Run along and make it last, now. Because you’ll be getting even less next year.”
If it were $5,000 a month, that might be saying something, sort of. But that still wouldn’t stop these so-called horsemen and horsewomen from selling their unwanted, tired, beat up, worn out and lame racehorses at the livestock auction, to the Amish, to the killbuyers and to the meatpackers.
During the talk about stopping the government subsidies to horseracing in Pennsylvania, some so-called horse people in Pennsylvania were claiming that the money from the government subsidies was “their money” as if they were entitled to it for eternity. They’re literally taking money for their horse-abusing, horse-doping, horse-killing business and keeping the young people of that state from having a lot of their basic needs met, but I didn’t see one comment on the internet that even remotely cared about anyone but themselves regarding these selfish, sadistic, greedy, money-grubbing horse killers in Pennsylvania. We should all just feel so bad for these morally depraved people who would have to change occupations, after say 40 years of living on a breeding farm, for example. It appears to be basically the same attitude in every state when it comes to Corporate Welfare to Horseracing.
The subsidies definitely need to be TERMINATED from going to this outright cruelty to horses known as horseracing and redirected to the essential services and needs of young people especially education.
The $5000 towards aftercare just made me snort.