The Added Animal Cruelty at Saratoga Race Course Yesterday

The following tracks canceled racing yesterday due to extreme heat: Belterra, Colonial, Delaware, Ellis, Monmouth. (Several had also canceled the day before.) Who was racing? Among others, Saratoga. When the 1st race kicked off there at 1:12, says the chart, the temp was 95. But I can tell you (because I live in the region) it felt worse than that. In a word, oppressive. Undeterred, NYRA pressed on. Nothing was going to stop Opening Day!

Now consider this: In addition to being forced, via a whip, to run, at breakneck speeds, in that heat and humidity, all those poor horses were controlled with a chunk of metal in their mouths: the infamous bit. To remind, here is what equine ENT expert Dr. Robert Cook says happens to bitted racehorses. (Dr. Cook was writing off photos – at bottom – taken at Saratoga a few years back. Full post here.)

“All of these racehorses will run their forthcoming race in pain from the bit. A recognized principle of saddle-fitting is that the saddle should not apply direct pressure on the bone of the spine. The same principle is overlooked in relation to bit use, the declared purpose of which is to apply pressure on the bars of the mouth, the jawbone. Imagine how we would feel if we were ‘trained’ by the repeated pressure of one or more metal rods against both our shins? A horse’s mouth is much more sensitive.

“The horse is a nose-breathing animal and cannot mouth-breathe. In the wild it runs with a closed mouth, sealed lips, and a negative atmospheric pressure in the oral cavity. Suction pressure locks the soft palate onto the root of an immobile tongue to maintain an open airway. A bit breaks the lip seal, admits air into the mouth, and unlocks the soft palate, which now obstructs the airway. But this is not all.

“Airway obstruction at the level of the throat will cause pressure damage to the lungs and [that is] why all these horses will ‘bleed.’ As their lungs are repeatedly bruised and quickly waterlogged…some horses may experience severe chest pain and a frightening sensation of drowning. Any one of them could die from so-called ‘exercise-induced pulmonary hemorrhage.’ A better name for this universal problem of the bitted-and-bleeding racehorse is ‘negative-pressure pulmonary edema’; a life-threatening emergency in human medicine.

“In a word, all of these horses will experience varying degrees of suffocation…. I see that at least six of them are harnessed with two bits, a snaffle and a ring bit. A ring bit is especially severe and one horse is encumbered with this and a tongue-tie. The physical and emotional enormity of bit usage would be difficult to overstate. Its self-evident purpose to cause pain is bad enough, but its unintended consequence of asphyxiation brings to mind the method’s similarity to that of waterboarding. In my opinion, a bitted rein is a whip by another name; an unrecognized lung-damaging device that, during extreme physical exercise, inevitably causes pain, suffocation and premature exhaustion.”

“Drowning.” “Suffocation.” “Asphyxiation.” “Waterboarding.” And all the worse in oppressive weather conditions. Can we even begin to fathom what those horses experienced yesterday?

Not that this is the point, but (at least) two horses were ambulanced off the Saratoga track yesterday: Fireballin (“appearing in distress”) and Lovely Grey. The latter was part of what the TDN called a “four-horse spill,” with all four hitting the turf.