The NYS Gaming Commission has just recently relayed this for Wicked Improbable at Belmont last Friday: “horse collapsed near the 1/2 mile pole…euthanized at [hospital].” The horse in question was but three years old. Of note, the Commission describes the weather conditions that day as “cold” – obviously.
These horse-killing creeps should be arrested for abusing a young colt to death. It is an atrocity that animal abusers can hide behind the gaming commission and dupe the public into thinking that this mistreatment of horses is beyond their control. This abuse and killing of young and underdeveloped horses is absolutely within their morally depraved control. They do this to horses on purpose and then pretend that it’s a big mystery when they break the bodies of horses down. There is no mystery about it! These morally depraved animal abusers do this to horses on purpose and lie. Unfortunately, too many people are stupid enough to believe their filthy lies.
“Cold” is an obscenely inadequate word for what those conditions were. Air temperature at Belmont for Friday, January30: 6 °F high/ –8 °F low. “Feels like” temp: –10 °F to –15 °F or colder in gusts. Running a three-year-old racehorse at speed in single-digit temperatures with sub-zero wind chill is unthinkable but apparently not to the idiots at Belmont. It is physiologically dangerous. Horses are nasal breathers. At a gallop, they move massive volumes of air through their respiratory tract. That air is supposed to be warmed by the nasal passages before it hits the lungs. In extreme cold, the system is overwhelmed. Exercising horses in extreme cold increases the risk of lower airway injury, bleeding, and collapse. Such unnecessary suffering!