All horse prices were over-inflated in the late 1970s and early 1980s thanks to the tax structure. You could write off your entire “hobby,” as “living art.” What year did that change?
I grew up in the arabian world; I was a small child when the bottom fell out of the arabian market due to the change in tax laws. It was not happy times for arabian breeders who were sustaining a lifestyle on those insane prices.
But while arabs were garnering a million dollars and five-figure stud fees, Northern Dancer was supposedly bringing in a million dollars a pop for each mare covered. Racing will always hold the ultimate nonsensical prices. That’s why they call it “the sport of kings.”
Horses are prey animals, they hit the ground out of the womb and are up within an hour or so, turned out within 24 hours able to play and within a few days they are pretty good at getting around, discover the fun of running and keeping up with the mare/herd and they double in size and weight within a month. They had to survive over eons on the bottom of the food chain.
Dogs are predators, born totally helpless, have the luxury of time to develop outside the womb instead of being born ready to run. At 6 weeks they are still pretty immature while that 6 week old foal is playing hard with his pals.
Dont think the two are a good comparison for effects of exercise on skeletal development.
Not just racers started as long yearlings or early 2 year olds either. Many stock horse breeds are backed around 20 months and in work, possibly in the show ring under saddle by the end of the 2 year old year. For sure they are broke and going midway thru their 3rd year.
Good point. And one could argue that the “slow” work they do is as (or more) harmful as the galloping at speed TBs do. Western futurity horses spend a lot of time working on small circles, often with heads tied down, using their bodies in ways that are perhaps less natural than a running racehorse on a large oval.
I’ve started TB yearlings/2yos under saddle and it is much easier than a 4yo WB. They learn quickly, arent too hard on themselves, and don’t spend excessive time in a round pen, on a lunge line, or working with in an unnatural frame.
To add to what findeight said, puppies are born with the same general shape as human babies–they are almost all body and have very short legs. Foals are born with legs that are 90% of their adult length. And they absolutely hit the ground running.
We had a filly born a few days ago who was cantering circles around her stall within hours of being born. When she was turned out for the first time a day later, she ran for the first 20 minutes, much of that time going flat out around the paddock. (Her dam was not amused. :lol: )
This is a picture of that filly when she was 36 hours old. She’s built to run and she couldn’t wait to do so. A puppy at the same age wouldn’t even be crawling yet. https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?f…type=3&theater
You can keep a young dog from racing around by controlling its exercise. But if you turn a TB out, it’s going to run.
Astern is a looker, and so is your filly. No wonder she’s coordinated, in his stallion advert there is a video clip of Astern running around his paddock while chewing on a mouthful of grass. He looks like a pretty confident guy.
What a good year for you LaurieB. Three super foals.
Seeing the studies on early conditioning and the lower limbs that people have linked/referenced here, I’m left to wonder: Have people been doing research on early conditioning and other parts of the body? I’d be curious to see the results.
I would not be so quick to judge. It’s not the speed, size of circle, or head position, it’s training adaptation and progressive loading. If the horse has been given time to adapt to what it is being asked to do in a training program, and given time to recover and strengthen progressively, then it is perfectly fine to do small circles or have a head down or go fast.
It’s the people who don’t bother to understand and apply basic tenets of conditioning and just repeat ad nauseam their personal beliefs who are a hazard to the horse.
Ditto…and if you depend on what others say for details and don’t observe or participate in the training process, you may be basing your opinion on false facts from unqualified sources.
I was speaking from my own personal experience starting young horses, and 3 months of daily observations of a successful western pleasure trainer. Not false facts or secondhand opinions.
I did not agree with his WP methods, but I will freely praise his feel, talent, and riding ability. It is my understanding that most of his “controversial” (to me) techniques are relatively common in that discipline…30min of rigorous round pen work daily with 2yos, tying heads to tails to teach “bend”, daily riding in draw reins (not harshly, but consistent) most time spent with poll below withers. There was not much slow buildup to work, it was a compressed timeline and horses were expected to be very broke and show ready in 90 days. He was generally a good horseman and I would have happily let him train my horse without shortcuts.
Gotta sign up to read the whole thing and for me, that’s not gonna happen.
So, couldn’t read how the “much higher rate” was determined. How do you compare equine fatality/injury in one sport with a different sport when each sport has some unique characteristics with different equine physiology required during competition.
PARIS, Ky. — One hundred nine years ago, Arthur B. Hancock moved his thoroughbred breeding operation atop a slab of mineral rich limestone carpeted by thick, lush bluegrass. He called it Claiborne Farm.
It is to horse racing what the Yankees are to baseball: the bedrock of more than 75 champions and the land where the immortal Secretariat stood as a stallion.
Now, Walker Hancock, who is the fifth generation of his family to run Claiborne Farm, is afraid there will be nothing left to pass down to the sixth.
He is terrified, he said, that the sport is living on borrowed time, as are most people in what remains the heart and soul of the thoroughbred industry.
Horses have been dying in high numbers at a premier track and while nobody knows exactly why, the treatment of the animals — before, during and after racing — is under the harshest scrutiny in years.
“The way it’s going right now, it’s not sustainable,” Hancock, 29, said of the sport. “We got to change the public’s perception and clean this thing up if we are going to survive.”
At a recent auction at Keeneland in Lexington, Ky., the usual chatter about fast horses getting ready for the Kentucky Derby on Saturday and the other Triple Crown races afterward quickly gave way to talk about the dead ones at Santa Anita Park in Arcadia, Calif.: 23 of them in a three-month span that has nearly shut down racing in Southern California.
Nearly 10 horses a week, on average, died at American racetracks in 2018, according to the Jockey Club’s Equine Injury Database. That’s a fatality rate that is anywhere from two and a half to five times greater than in the rest of the racing world.
Outside of the United States, medications for racehorses are strictly regulated, policed and punished, according to the Jockey Club, among the oldest and most influential organizations in horse racing. Cracking down on drugs is essential, reformers say, because the drugs allow horses to run unnaturally fast and mask pain, which leads to more breakdowns.
This is a crisis for people in the sport whose livelihoods depend on the breeding and nurturing, and the buying and selling, of racehorses.
Although the horsemen are not exactly cozying up to the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, or PETA, breeders recognize that the concerns the group has raised might be the hammer they need to make changes that will save their sport.
After all those horse fatalities in California, Kathy Guillermo, a PETA vice president, had a hand in drawing up rules that Santa Anita Park put in place governing the use of drugs and whips that approach international standards and that are expected to transform the racetrack into one of the safest and most progressive in the country. Last week, Guillermo, who has family roots in Kentucky and grew up riding hunter jumpers, spoke at a Churchill Downs Inc. shareholders meeting and was asked afterward to meet with its leadership.
“You are now dealing with a public that has become intolerant of broken bones, whipping, drugging and death,” Guillermo said. “I make them nervous,” she said of the horse industry, “though we should be on the same side, really.”
WHERE THE HORSES ROAM
At Claiborne, leggy foals, one less than 12 hours old, chased their mothers through undulating bluegrass behind wood plank fences. Pickup trucks patrolled its 3,000 acres and passed structures that date to the 1700s. It takes 100 employees to keep the farm humming and the nearly 400 horses cared for.
In the stallion barn stood War Front, who commands $250,000 per mating and is the sire of the likely Kentucky Derby favorite, Omaha Beach, and another contender, War of Will. Two other horses from Claiborne sires, Cutting Humor and Tax, are in the Derby field, which means 20 percent of the starters were bred here.
Claiborne is the center of a $5.2 billion ecosystem that puts 61,000 people to work on more than 831,000 acres. But for how long?
Horse racing has been on the decline for nearly two decades. In 2002, more than $15 billion was bet on races in the United States; last year, the handle fell to $11 billion. In 2002, nearly 33,000 thoroughbred foals were registered as racehorses compared with 19,925 last year.
In the late 1980s, Rob Whiteley, who taught counseling psychology at Rutgers before entering the horse business, helped transform Carl Icahn’s Foxfield thoroughbred operation into a moneymaking commercial breeding concern. Then he struck out on his own, bred 19 Grade I winners and landed on the important industry boards that consider rules about the treatment of horses.
“They truly ignored the negative trend in perception and lived in a bubble of self-deception, either not caring or not grasping how many people were turned off by the uses of drugs and the sight of riders hitting horses with whips,” said Whiteley, who sold his horses in 2012, unable to weather the financial crisis. “I could not recommend anyone coming into the business.”
PROMISES WITHOUT FOLLOW-THROUGH
There have been plenty of promises of reform from a who’s who of industry stalwarts and racetracks, but even the smallest steps toward adopting tougher rules have been met with outrage and threats of lawsuits from veterinarians, owners and trainers’ groups.
In 2012, Arthur B. Hancock III and his wife, Staci, founded the Water Hay Oats Alliance with the mission of getting drugs out of racing.
The group quickly grew to more than 1,800 industry members. It lobbied statehouses and regulators and went public with some of the sport’s dirtiest laundry to try to shame horsemen, veterinarians, politicians and regulators into treating thoroughbreds like athletes rather than commodities filled with a smorgasbord of anti-inflammatories and painkillers.
The group, along with the Jockey Club, helped shape a federal bill introduced in March with bipartisan support to create a uniform national standard for drug testing and medication rules in racehorses that would be overseen by the United States Anti-Doping Agency. The bill is backed by owners and breeders’ associations, animal welfare groups and racetracks, including the Stronach Group, which owns Santa Anita Park, and the New York Racing Association, the hosts of the Preakness Stakes and the Belmont Stakes.
Notably, Churchill Downs Inc., the host of America’s most famous race, and Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky and the Senate majority leader, who counts the company among his top patrons, do not support the bill.
“He politely and candidly told us that he appreciated what we were trying to do, but until Churchill got involved he couldn’t push the bill,” said Hancock, who said he met with the senator in 2016. McConnell, through a spokeswoman, declined to comment.
In a statement, Bill Carstanjen, chief executive of Churchill Downs, said the company had reviewed the bill and requested changes that were not addressed. “We don’t believe a federal bill is practical, reasonable, or imminent,” he said.
In a memo obtained by The New York Times that lays out Churchill Downs’s opposition to the bill, the company cites costs and the fact that trainers and veterinarian groups are against the measure. It also asks whether having the support of the Humane Society of the United States is “letting the fox in the henhouse.”
The company also points to the antidoping agency’s role in bringing down the cyclist Lance Armstrong, suggesting Usada might find much wrong and could not be trusted to keep information out of the public eye.
“While many point to Usada’s efforts in Lance Armstrong’s lifetime ban from cycling as a positive point in its favor, what consequences have there been as a result?” the memo asks. “Cycling has taken a beating as a participatory and commercial endeavor.”
The Louisville Courier-Journal recently proclaimed Churchill Downs one of the “deadliest racetracks” in America and reported that the track had lost 43 thoroughbreds to racing injuries since 2016, an average of 2.42 per 1,000 starts, which was 50 percent higher than the national average during the same time.
Under pressure from animal rights groups and a growing public perception that horse racing is cruel, Churchill Downs recently joined a coalition of racetracks that is seeking a ban on raceday medication for all of their 2-year-old races beginning next year and to extend that practice for stakes races — the sport’s highest level — in 2021.
It also announced that it would build an $8 million equine hospital, hire an equine medical director and create a national Office of Racing Integrity to develop best practices and research, but it has declined to endorse the bill.
“With their track record, they should be running toward this legislation,” Arthur Hancock said. “This is a life raft being thrown from the Titanic, but instead you got 55 different fiefdoms all going their own way while our history is going down.”
After the filly Eight Belles broke her ankles at the finish of the 2008 Kentucky Derby and was euthanized, Guillermo, the PETA leader, made making horse racing safer and more humane a priority. She lives in Northern California, where the animal rights movement is particularly strong. In California, just 600,000 signatures on a petition would prompt a ballot initiative on whether horse racing should continue to exist. That prompted the Stronach Group to issue the strongest rules on the care of horses in the United States.
Guillermo is not done. She wants the sport to eliminate all medications in the two weeks before a race, bar trainers with multiple medication violations, mandate complete public transparency of injury and medication records, end whipping and switch to high-quality synthetic tracks.
“You can’t tell me that the trainers and veterinarians and racetracks have done all that they can to protect the horses,” she said.
The deaths at Santa Anita have prompted an investigation by the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office; condemnations from elected officials, including Senator Dianne Feinstein, and calls to shut down the sport altogether.
“We can’t let that happen,” Walker Hancock said.
Like his father, Seth, and uncle Arthur, Walker Hancock was born in Kentucky in a house that has stood on the Bluegrass since 1865.
Like them, he has mowed its 3,000 acres, thrown countless tons of hay and each spring has pulled foals from mares and then watched them grow into racehorses.
Like them, he recognizes the paradox that what built one of America’s oldest sports — the love of the thoroughbred — has the potential to put it out of business.
“We got to start proving that we are doing all that we can to do the best for these horses,” he said. “If not, we are out of business and we should be.”
I would bear in mind the audience that the reporter was writing for here. This is obviously meant to be a lay article aimed at people outside the equine community. This means that, for those of us involved, we may read in biases that the author may or may not have intended to include. We also don’t know what further research could have gone into the piece that was truncated for the sake of length, clarity, or other reasons. But for those sources, you can tweet the author
