I am writing today to convey my heartfelt appreciation for your Animal Welfare Policy in general, and more specifically, for your position on animal racing and the rodeo. It is enlightened, progressive, and without question on the right side of history.
By way of introduction, Horseracing Wrongs, founded in 2013, is the leading advocacy voice for racehorses in the U.S. As founder and president, I was featured on HBO’s “Real Sports,” and have appeared on CNN and ESPN multiple times. I have also had op-eds solicited and subsequently published by The Washington Post, MSNBC, The Baltimore Sun, and Katie Couric Media, and have been interviewed by (among many others) The New York Times and The New Yorker. I regularly give talks at colleges and law schools and have testified before the NYS Senate.
As you read what follows, please know that everything we publish is 100% factual. The deaths, painstakingly compiled through FOIA requests to state racing commissions around the country, speak for themselves. But all the attendant cruelties, too, are fully supported by expert testimony. I am submitting this to not only give your company a broader knowledge of horseracing but to also help bolster your position in the face of inevitable industry backlash.
What Is Horseracing?
Through the force of brilliant marketing, the horseracing industry has conditioned the public to view it as just another sport – indeed “The Sport of Kings” – and the horses themselves “equine athletes.” But in what other sport does the following apply?
Forced, Heartrending Separation
Would-be racehorses are forever torn from their mothers and herds as mere babies. Sold, usually, at the tender age of one; broken, an industry term meaning to be made pliant and submissive; alone and terrified, their servitude begins.
Grinding of Unformed Bodies
Horses do not reach full musculoskeletal maturity – bones not done growing, plates not done fusing – till the age of six. And the higher up, the slower the process, so that the bones in the spine and neck, of all places, are the last to finish. Racehorses are typically thrust into intensive training at 18 months, and first raced at two – the rough equivalent of a first-grader. In the necropsies (obtained through FOIA requests), we see time and again 4-, 3-, even 2-year-old horses dying with chronic conditions like osteoarthritis and degenerative joint disease, often in all four limbs. This is clear, unequivocal evidence of the incessant pounding these unformed bodies are forced to absorb.
Confinement and Isolation
In perhaps the worst of it, as a rule, racehorses are kept locked – alone – in tiny 12×12 stalls for over 23 hours a day, making a mockery of the industry claim that “horses are born to run, love to run” and a cruelty all the worse for being inflicted on innately social animals like horses. Prominent equine veterinarian Dr. Kraig Kulikowski likens this to keeping a child locked in a 4×4 closet for over 23 hours a day. Imagine that. Relatedly, practically all the horse’s natural instincts and desires are thwarted, creating an emotional and mental suffering that is brought home with crystal clarity in the stereotypies commonly seen in confined racehorses: cribbing, wind-sucking, bobbing, weaving, pacing, digging, kicking, even self-mutilation.
Control and Subjugation
The racing people thoroughly control every moment of their assets’ lives – control that is often effected through force and intimidation: pushing, shoving, pulling, yanking, yelling, screaming; and through the tools of the trade: nose chains, lip chains, tongue ties, eye blinders, mouth “bits” – which, says Dr. Robert Cook, an expert in equine physiology, make the horses feel like they’re suffocating when being forced to run at breakneck speeds – and, of course, whips. On that, the very public flogging administered to racehorses would land a person in jail if done to his dog in the park. But at the track, it’s simply part of the “game.”
Drugging and Doping
Racehorses are injected, legally and otherwise, with myriad performance-enhancing, injury-masking, and pain-numbing chemicals. The horsemen’s credo is really quite simple: keep ’em on the track, keep ’em earning, by whatever means necessary.
Commodification
By law, racehorses are literal chattel – pieces of property to be bought, sold, traded, and dumped whenever and however their people decide. To make matters worse, they are not even afforded the protections, woefully inadequate as most are, of animal-cruelty statutes, meaning an owner or trainer can run his horse into the ground – yes, even to death – with virtual impunity. What’s more, the average racehorse will change hands multiple times over the course of his so-called career, adding anxiety and stress to an already anxious, stressful existence. This near-constant shuffling among trainers, grooms, vets, barns, tracks, and states is a primary reason why some 90% of active racehorses suffer from chronic ulcers.
Death
In the combined 418-year history of America’s four major sports – baseball, basketball, football, and hockey – there have been three – three – in-game deaths. About that many horses die in U.S. races every single day. Indeed, Horseracing Wrongs has documented – with names, dates, locations, and details – almost 13,000 kills at U.S. tracks just since 2014. Our research indicates that some 1,800 racehorses perish across America every year. 1,800 – that’s about five dead horses a day.
And to be clear, death at the track is neither clean nor tranquil. Death at the track is cardiovascular collapse, or a failed heart – this, mind you, to animals who are mostly still in adolescence. Death at the track is pulmonary hemorrhage – or bleeding out from the lungs. Death at the track is blunt-force trauma from flipping backward, out of fear, in the starting gate, or from collisions with other horses or the track itself. Death at the track is broken necks, severed spines, ruptured ligaments, fractured skulls, and shattered legs – occasionally shattered so severely that the limb remains attached to the rest of the body by skin or tendons only.
Death at the track also comes back in the stalls from things like colic, a painful, terrifying abdominal affliction; laminitis, excruciating inflammation in the feet; respiratory infections; parasitic infestations; and neurological disorders. Sometimes, the FOIA document simply reads, “found dead in the morning.” These are still-very-much-active racehorses, in between races, and again, most of them mere adolescents.
Slaughter
And finally, in what other sport are the athletes bled-out and butchered upon retirement? Two independent studies (here, here), as well as industry admissions, reveal that many if not most spent or simply no-longer-wanted racehorses are mercilessly and violently slaughtered at “career’s” end. From athlete to meat, in a matter of days.
Truth is, in regard to how the relative animals are treated, there is not one iota of difference between dogracing and horseracing. In fact, one could argue that horseracing is worse for the slaughter. But while one form of animal racing is all but dead – there are just two dog tracks left in the entire country; more telling, dogracing is prohibited on moral grounds in 44 states – the other remains protected under this banner of sport.
Confinement. Isolation. Subjugation. Pain. Suffering. Death. A “sport”? If not for the gravity involved, ‘twould be absurd. No, in truth, horseracing is but a failing gambling business that exploits, abuses, and kills sentient beings, inherently, and inevitably.
Thank you again, Tripadvisor, for taking this wonderful stand for suffering and dying animals everywhere.
Great job, Horseracing Wrongs! Thank you for all your hard work!