Causes Trouble, an “injured, vanned off” at Parx Saturday, has been confirmed dead. For their part, Causes’ owner, John Fanelli, and the PA Thoroughbred Horsemen’s Bob Hutt are blaming the track, saying the condition of the turf was poor. Fanelli (in TDN): “It’s always been known as a bad course, but if I knew it was that bad, I never would have put my horse on that surface.” Hmm, but you did, and it’s “always been bad.”
Hutt praised HISA, who got involved after the fact and was instrumental in getting the turf course shut down. Hutt even went so far as to credit HISA chief Lisa Lazarus with being “responsible for saving many horses’ lives.” Rich, huh? Fanelli kind of thinks so, saying, “HISA is supposed to accredit these tracks and the surfaces. I’m trying to find out the last time they were here and how they possibly said it was a safe surface.” Exactly.
It’s always the same, bad track, bad weather, bad planet alignment, blah, blah, blah, with the same disgusting sprinkling of pretending to give a s*** about the horse while HISA acts like it’s doing a credible job of investigating when everyone of its members has their head firmly planted up their own moral ass.
Where does John Fanelli draw the line between “bad” and “that bad”?
Why would he be willing to put his horse’s life on the line as a way to find out too late that it was “that bad”?
It sounds like he didn’t really care about his horse “that much” to me. If he at least wanted his horse to survive the course, he could have walked the course himself and/or he could have ridden a different horse over the course at a walk to get a clue about whether a racehorse could have survived the course without injuries. If he knew how bad it was before the race, he could have not entered his horse at Parx.
Regardless of the track surface, the greed and disregard for the safety and well-being of horses in general on the part of Mr. John Fanelli and everyone who attempts to profit from putting their horses’ lives on the line is what is the real killer of horses in this industry.
This guy makes himself look like one sorry sap of a human being.