In a Daily Racing Form article on a Bob Baffert horse (Muth) skipping an upcoming race because of the trainer’s dissatisfaction with a workout yesterday, the “reporter” mentions, almost incidentally, that another horse was killed in that same workout. Big Switch, who had just turned five, is Cal Racing’s latest victim – that would be #13 on the young year.
A riding instructor 40 years ago, Kevin Kohler, told us if a horse stops when you`re riding & makes a strange kind of whinny immediately jump off as its likely the horses heart is failing & the horse will drop. He had it happen to him. At 68 we have fortunately never had a horse drop on us. Many times we were way deep into a mountainous area far from anywhere. We have galloped many horses at the track & fortunately only had 2 break down on us.
I’m 77 years old and been associated with horses all my life in some capacity or another. I had my Saddlebred Pleasure Horse die under me and the necropsy showed heart attack. Right up until he went down while I was working him, he never showed any sign of distress. A decade earlier I was on a trail ride with neighbors and neighbors friends and one of the horses along with us died on the trail. Never knew the reason. Larger families, for instance the Kennedy’s, will have more personal tragedies just because the odds are higher with that many family members. A Thoroughbred racehorse trainer, who can have upwards to a hundred horses under his care, will deal with good odds that a good number of those horses will die for some reason or another. The trainer that has just 10 horses probably won’t lose any horse. My issue with racing is that those horses are way too young to be doing the kind of physical activity demanded of them. Why can’t their racing days START at three and not two and their actual race days start at four? I know why. Money. Greed. That’s what I hate the most.
Speaking of the connections — the “trainer” Bob Baffert has at least 75 horse kills to his “credit” (🤮🤬) and for the “trainer” Steve Asmussen, I don’t have a number other than the euthanized ECHO ZULU being the current horse kill on his list as far as I know. He could have a dozen or a thousand low-level claiming horses that will NEVER-IN-A-MILLION-YEARS be reported by the racing industry publications.
The information available online is that Bob Baffert’s training fee is $1.5 Million per horse, plus he has killed 75 horses. If that doesn’t tell you something, what will?
As far as the racing press goes, the horses are just gambling objects — VERY EXPENDABLE gambling objects! If the horse is not a high profile horse, then “who cares?!” That’s how much they love horses…🤬🤮
Wanda, we both know how this transpired…
The story goes that she was “cast in her stall” and broke her leg above the plate that had been inserted.
Leave it to “the experts” to put her in a stall where she could get cast and not be able to get on her feet without an extreme struggle and guaranteed sure-fire way to get injured after already being injured badly enough to require surgery (in the attempt to save her life).
***Way to think about what could go wrong before putting an injured horse’s life at more dangerous RISK OF POSSIBLY CATASTROPHIC INJURIES, you genius horseracing industry people.***
And what’s sickening….oh oh my heart goes out to the connections.
At this point, I’m expecting the remaining members of the (fact-seeking, dead-horse-revealing, super-journalistic) racing press to have their heads explode from being forced to print accounts of all this daily carnage…
Just kidding, of course. They’ll still find a way to avoid mentioning 99 percent of all racehorse kills; it’s what makes them the pros they are.
It’s being reported Echo Zulu has died. Another beautiful creature gone from this lousy “sport”.