I was encouraged and discouraged in equal measure on Saturday morning as I watched a CBS report on horse racing.
I was encouraged because it cited “growing concern” that an average of 10 horses a week are dying on race tracks. This is causing some industry leaders to call for a “strong central authority” to regulate things like “drug use, veterinary records, and even use of the whip.”
No less a person than Arthur Hancock III, whose Stone Farm stables in Kentucky has fielded 14 international champions, is leading those calls.
[Hancock] believes American horses are entirely over-medicated, and many drugs mask underlying issues, putting perhaps slightly injured horses on the path to a fatal injury.
‘I contend that if a horse needs drugs to run he doesn’t need to be running. He needs to run on his natural ability … not some chemically induced ability,’ Hancock said.
(CBS This Morning Saturday, November 30, 2019)
I was discouraged because some of us have been sounding alarms about horse racing for over a decade. This makes the “growing concern” of insiders like Hancock smack of closing stables after the horses have bolted.
Here, for example, is what even I wrote in “Sadly, the Bell Tolled for Eight Belles at the Kentucky Derby,” May 6, 2008:
____________________
The sport of kings? Indeed! But so is the barbarism of fox hunting. …
[J]ust like Barbaro, Eight Belles pulled up lame, after breaking both front ankles, at the Kentucky Derby. However, unlike Barbaro, she was put out of her misery right on the spot!
Why? The reason, I submit, is that she did not have the potential to generate much income for her owners off the track. Therefore, they had no vested interest in trying to save her. …
[I]t’s one thing to race horses in their natural state. It’s quite another, however, to inject them with so many pharmaceuticals to make them bigger, stronger and faster that their skinny legs cannot support their unnatural body mass [especially when all half-ton of it is pounding the ground at 40 miles an hour, one foot at a time].
____________________
Of course, fox hunting is banned in England. But it might be too genteel or foreign an analogy for many of you to appreciate.
Therefore, consider that horse racing is no more a sport and has no greater socially redeeming value than dog fighting. And, just as no dog lover would countenance the latter, no horse lover would (or should) countenance the former.
Frankly, the whole culture of horse racing is morally and socially repugnant. And no amount of mint juleps or top hats can imbue it with humane regard. This is why, instead of calling for stricter regulation, horse racers – who claim to love horses above all else – should call for an outright ban.
Dog lovers effectuated a ban on dog fighting by getting the media to cast high-profile insiders like Michael Vick as social pariahs. Horse lovers would do well to emulate them by getting the media to cast even well-intentioned insiders like Arthur Hancock III as social pariahs too.
Moreover, once banned, let’s hope America does a better job of enforcing it than England is doing with its ban on fox hunting.
Despite overwhelming public opposition and a longstanding ban, fox hunting shows no signs of abating in the UK. The 2018 hunt season alone saw 550 reports of illegal hunting, though these figures only represent known incidents. …
So if the ban is entering its 15th year, why is fox hunting still happening?
(The Conversation, January 30, 2019)
Related commentaries:
the bell tolled…
dog fighting…