I seem to remember in the last few weeks going to MSNBC and looking at their “Pictures of the Week” spread. I like to check it out each week.
There was a picture not that long ago of a horse race. The horses are racing toward the camera and one horse’s leg had completely snapped in half. You could see the bone sticking out - it had just happened and the horse was still upright. Pretty scary and flinching, really. I can’t seem to find this picture anymore - and I think I may have been (possibly) looking at an older week’s(like from a year ago) set of pictures.
Has anyone else seen this? Can someone point me in the right direction to find it?
Also…what amazing/powerful pictures have you seen on the web? (no porn!) Please warn if they are remotely graphic (some from the war are this way and come with warnings, like on MSNBC).
if you wanna talk graphic and stomach-churning, Rotten dot com has images that will send the queasy running.
regarding that horse image… i can recall watching one of the major horse races on TV many years back (Kentucky Derby?), where a horse fell, broke its leg, then proceded to get up and attempt running again. that’s an image i wish i could lose (and another piece of ammunition in my anti-horse racing stance). i’m rather hoping the picture you saw is an recycled capture of that event.
i’d hate to think that happens more frequently, although (unfortunately) i can’t doubt it could.
Ugh. Ruffian, the three-year-old filly, at Belmont in 1975.
I train jumper and dressage horses. Sometimes we buy and rehab racehorses. For the first six months or so, we just turn them out in the paddocks to learn how to be horses again. The track is a messed-up place.
I’ve only been to the races a few times, I used to go with my parents years ago. I still remember them dragging a twitching horse into the back of a trailer with a wench, couldn’t see much because it was on the other side of the track but that was a site I won’t ever forget.
Oh man, I don’t want to look at pictures like what I saw years ago on Rotten dot com. I don’t want to ever see that site again.
I meant powerful images like those of …I dunno, school chilren outside playing in the snow that is illuminated by bombs falling on Iraq in the distance - GOOD photography.
I’m wondering if maybe the pic was of Landseer in this past year’s Breeder’s Cup Mile. You may want to search using those terms. The poor fellow broke down turning for home and stunningly was able to gallop on those 3 1/2 legs for quite a while before falling. He was, of course, nearly immediately euthanized.
Most repugnant thing I ever saw was Go For Wand’s breakdown, just 100 yards from the wire, in the 1990 Breeder’s Cup Distaff. It was bad enough watching her fall, but the slo-mo, watching her hobble on 3 legs, and then the completely nauseating frame-by-frame photo spread in Sports Illustrated physically repulsed me.
A friend of mine is a racing trainer of the old school thought; he doesn’t push them young, gives them time off, and when injured, lets them rest for double to triple what most trainers would do. Unbelievable but true, he’d NEVER lost a horse due to fatal injury until this past year–from a horse he claimed (bought) from another trainer. His horses are healthy and amazingly sound-minded, and he is well-known for having horses race well past age 8 (double the retirement age of most horses) because of his gentle handling.
A lot of the backstretch talk about both Ruffian and Go For Wand, meanwhile, is that both were sore, and had been known to be sore, and had been shot up with all kinds of painkillers that eventually proved lethal. (Take that with a grain of salt; it’s basically racetrack gossip.) True or not, it’s sickening what some people do to these creatures.
Essentially, it isn’t that easy with horses. There are very few exceptions; I’ve heard of two (in my lifetime) horses with prosthetic limbs. But a fractured leg can lead to an enormous mess of other problems. Often, the leg doesn’t need to be fractured to be fatal, and certainly not as catastrophically shattered as in Landseer’s case. A sore leg means the horse will shift his/her weight to an uninjured leg, and that shift can be what’s lethal–it can result in laminitis, where the bone literally begins to fall through the hoof. When both forelegs are sore, the horse may rock back on their hindquarters, trying to take the pain off the front, and then the rear may start to suffer from muscle deterioration.
This is no fantastic worst-case scenario; in fact, it’s what happened to the nearly invaluable (had to be well, well over $50 million) stallion Sunday Silence this past summer.
Teaching a horse–particularly a high-strung young thoroughbred stallion–can be a near impossible task. From what I understand, they oftentimes won’t put weight on the prosthetic–thus creating the excruciatingly painful, and ultimately lethal, series of events detailed above.
