Letters to the Editor
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it's a horse
a horse.
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@GoBucks
It's better than being an ass.
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@djansing
By all means, let's ban boxing. It's as senseless a sport as TB racing.
But I have to take issue with two statements you make: Horses would be an "endangered species" were it not for racing. This is waaaay off the mark. A study done for the American Horse Council estimates 9.2 million horses in the US. today. Of these, the largest segment is "recreational" horses (3.9 million). In contrast, there are only about 844,000 horses in racing. The AHC study, done by Deloitte & Touche showed that the horse industry contributes some $39 billion to the U.S. economy every year.
Second, you state that those involved in racing have the best interest of the horse in mind. If that were the case, they wouldn't race them at two years of age, way before they're structurally mature; they wouldn't fill them full of drugs, legal and illegal; they would breed for soundness as well as speed.
Racing personnel may treat the horses well day to day, but the underlying system itself is abusive.
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"As a racing fan, I've learned to accept injuries..."
Oh, that's good. Do you think the horses have?
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to Allie:
"It's a bald-faced lie to say that Eight Belles was "beaten" as she headed down the home stretch. There's video which shows nothing remotely like a beating ever happened, and you are educated enough to know the difference between guiding a horse away from the rail (which would cause her to go down in a crumpled ball if she ran into it) and beating her. Your point looks more valid if you don't resort to lying."
I didn't resort to lying: Eight Belles was whipped three times with the right hand, and twice with the left (google it, or watch the video again, if you don't believe me.) The rail is on the LEFT side of the filly, so why in God's name would the jockey hit her on the right side three times, thus driving her into the rail?? Because, slow wit, he wanted more speed. Had he just hit her with the left hand, it would be a different story. Call me a liar? I'll call you an idiot.
Idiot.
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@Woodviolet
Thank you for your comprehension and your compassion.
It is very difficult for people to release denial, particularly when it comes to fully owning what may be wrong about their relationships to other living beings.
You tell it well. People bat away empathy sometimes, because to feel it would break their hearts. Then they'd have to heal their hearts, and to stay whole afterward, behave differently.
It happens, when there is respect and support for thoughtfulness, and a willingness to see clearly. It's hard for people to think this new way, especially when it challenges long-held rationalizations, but if "tradition" justified most human choices, gosh, we'd be doing things like dropping bombs, annihilating civilians, and ignoring the global impacts of factory farming and filling the ocean with plastic. Hmm.
The way we view and treat other animals, besides those whose flesh we like the taste of, seems tangential, but it's not.
It's all of a moral piece, and that's hard for people to swallow.
What a different world we could have if we looked at most human institutions through those eyes. And then changed them.
We could.
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Wow
Now that I've read some of the letters, I see I was not the first (or even the fifth?) person to single out that particular line.
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Head in the sand (dirt)
anyone else notice the short shrift, including the decision not to air the injury, that the network paid to the fatality? wouldn't want to sully the dream-like minty ambience of the derby .... all those silly hats got more coverage than this tragedy.
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Please take that awful picture off the front page!
I really don't want to see an animal in pain when I open Salon, and I think it's astonishingly insensitive of you to put this particular picture where people can't avoid it. You could communicate the tragedy just as well with a picture of Eight Bells in her glory.
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Reminded of Ruffian
Ruffian snapped her foreleg while running a match race against Foolish Pleasure in the 1970s. She was also 3, and wouldn't stop running until the hoof was simply flopping and the bones were digging into the track.
It was awful, and I seem to remember it was years before Ruffian's owners ran a filly again.
As in dogs, the females are finer animals... and should be, according to type (part of their breed standard).
I don't think horseracing is barbaric; it's a wonderful sport. But these incidents do give us pause. They're beautiful, mighty beasts... but we're reminded of the fragility of their species -- and ours -- when these things happen.
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The picture of that horse's suffering belongs on Salon's front page.
If Eight Belles and other race horses can endure the pain and suffering of the despicable horse racing industry, the least the rest of us can do is bear witness to it.
I only wish that slaughterhouses and cosmetics laboratories and fur "farms" and the rest had glass walls, so that the terrible cruelty in those industries could be visible to all (thanks to Paul McCartney for that suggestion).
Some people in these letter pages criticize PETA for speaking out against horse racing, but PETA isn't the problem: horse racing is. Moreover, it's odd has PETA is criticized when its primary mission is to end cruelty to animals, but its extremely powerful enemies -- the meat industry, the dairy and egg industries, the fur industry, the cosmetics industry, and more -- that abuse and sometimes torture literally billions of animals every year, are accepted as the norm. Thanks, but no thanks; the status quo is sick.
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Culture
In European racing, which also has two year old races, there are much different conditions in that the tracks are turf, they can be either right or left handed and the courses are 'old' turf-groomed for racing for hundreds of years. And while it may be impossible to re-create these conditions in America, the culture of racing there is better, too.
In EU racing, many other factors are more important than mere speed. The racing writers show this: in terms like "finished well within himself", or "showed class". In America, they say-the early fractions, the half mile was run in 46 and change, the last eith of a mile was run in 12 seconds.
The clock is the problem. We leave out all the "art" and "tactics" of racing that makes it beautiful.
I rode for a great trainer, Sidney Watters, who died this past winter at age 90. All his young horses were taken out on trails, galloped up and down hills, were turned out in pastures with varied terrain and streams. This is the norm in Europe.
Most American thoroughbreds are coddled, kept on flat surfaces, never out in real nature-they are factory farmed animals. If I wanted to rehab a Thoroughbred after racing, it would never be one of these animals from sterile factory farms. Too much trouble.
Trainers are saying they are seeing more tendon and soft tissue injuries on synthetic tracks. But, a percentage better than dirt tracks for catastrophic breakdowns is a good thing.