Your recent article on “Betting the Belmont Stakes” includes a line that begins with “a thoughtful approach.” That thoughtful approach, of course, is in reference to various betting factors – not to the horses themselves. In fact, missing entirely from the piece is any mention of the relative morality of horseracing in the 21st Century.
That horses suffer and die at American racetracks – including Belmont, Saratoga, and Yonkers – is beyond dispute. Through our unprecedented FOIA reporting, Horseracing Wrongs has documented – with names, dates, locations, and details – over 12,000 kills at U.S. tracks just since 2014, with over 1,200 of those coming at NYS tracks. Our research indicates that some 1,800 racehorses perish across America every year. 1,800 – that’s about five horses dying every day from things like cardiovascular collapse, pulmonary hemorrhage, blunt-force trauma, broken necks, severed spines, ruptured ligaments, fractured skulls, and shattered legs.
Still, death is but part of the horseracing story. The typical racehorse is torn from his mother as a mere babe, thrust into an intensive training regimen at 18 months – long before his body is even remotely mature – and first raced at two, the rough equivalent of a first-grader. From there, the incessant grinding – again, on an unformed skeleton – begins, because if he’s not racing, he’s not earning. He is confined (alone – to a tiny 12×12 stall for over 23 hours a day), commodified (auctions, “claiming races”), controlled (cribbing collars, lip chains, tongue ties, eye blinders, mouth bits), and cowed (whips). Bought and sold multiple times over the course of his so-called career, he lives a stressful, tenuous existence that in and of itself causes pain: studies show that upward of 90% of active racehorses suffer from chronic ulcers.
Truth is, in regard to how the relative animals are treated, there is not a whit of difference between dogracing and horseracing. But while one form is all but dead – there are currently only two dog tracks left in the entire country; more telling, dogracing is outright prohibited on moral grounds in 44 states (including NY) – the other continues along merrily under the banner of “sport.” It is high time we right this wrong. Horseracing is animal cruelty. Horseracing is animal killing. Horseracing must end.
Patrick Battuello
Founder/President, Horseracing Wrongs
