Are you completely unfamiliar with the sport, or are you arguing semantics of beat vs. whip?
Just nitpicking: Not every cow you see. Sometimes you get families like mine that get lucky and have a cow that stays fertile so long that she dies of old age after twenty years of beautiful calves and being spoiled rotten for being the old cow that everyone loves. Usually when a breeding cow gets old, she stops calving, and becomes hamburger. But not always, especially not on small farms that are just big enough to keep one or two ancient cows around.
Other times, more tragically, despite the best doctoring and vaccinations you can give them, a cow can die of an injury or illness. Legally you can’t sell the carcass of a downer cow for meat- so you definitely can’t sell a dead one.
Um, abuse of the whip is taken pretty seriously. Are you familiar with the sport, or do you take all you know from questionable articles which try to confuse the situation in Macau with that of the UK/US?
Oh ok, some asshole set guidelines for the placement and number of whips you can give a horse in a race, and as long as they don’t violate those rules, then in your mind everything is peachy and its not beating and the horse doesn’t get hurt. Can I come over and beat you with the same whip, as long as its not in the head or flanks if you aren’t running fast enough to win me money? :rolleyes:
They take it pretty seriously?
*In a much cheaper race three years ago, a claiming race at Santa Anita, in fact, Nakatani rode a favorite who did not win, and he was seen hitting the horse on the neck well past the finish line. He said the horse was lugging out, and the trainer wanted to work the horse more after the race. The case became a cause celebre in Los Angeles. Nakatani was fined $500 and suspended for five days. *
Double :rolleyes:
Have you any actual evidence that the horse does get hurt?
You realize that horses are pretty big animals, right? After all, when was the last time you strapped a saddle to somebody and rode around on him? Perhaps that should clue you in that horse-human comparisons aren’t necessarily helpful in this situation.
*And everyone in racing agrees that the whip, like the bit in a horse’s mouth, sends messages by pressure or pain.
‘‘Sure, it hurts a horse,’’ said the renowned veterinarian Dr. Alex Harthill of Louisville, Ky.*
You’re positing the horse responds after a whip due to training, not pain, that it thinks “the guy on me just indicated to me in a friendly painless manner he would like me to run faster”? Then why the need for limits on placement and quantity?
I meant hurt as in permanently injured. Not hurt as in a bit of a sting.
Besides, the vet you quote doesn’t favour banning whipping outright, either.
I am closely involved with these issues. Many of the things said in that article are not true. Perhaps they once were, they are not any more.
First things first. Do people who eat steak hate cows? No, they do not, they usually kind of like them. The people who raise cows to be eaten also like them. They like being around them and want them to be comfortable, even though they know their ultimate fate will be to appear on a plate. The same holds true in the race horse industry. The vast majority of those involved love horses - despite the economics of the industry dictating some tough situations and the reality of horse ’ physiology.
A Thoroughbred horse that is not fast/sound enough to race but is fast/sound enough to do less athletic pursuits is a valuable horse in the big scheme of the entire horse population in this country, it would be extremely unlikely that someone would have to sell them to slaughter as a first option.
There have been studies of the demographics of horses going to slaughter plants - the population reflects that of the horse population in general. The majority are grade/QH types. Draft horses are a premium. Very, very few have been on the track. One can tell absolutely if a horse has been on a race track because it is either tattoed on the lip [Thoroughbred, racing Quarter Horse] or freeze branded on the neck [Standardbred].
In this country there is not a single horse being slaughtered for human consumption. NOT ONE. The last two equine plants closed last year. This has resulted in two things:
Horses are now trucked all over the country to Southern Texas and sold at auction as riding horses. They are shipped across the border as “riders” because it is against the law to export horses for slaughter. In Mexico they are re-sold at auction as “killers” and slaughtered in plants with a fraction of the standards ensuring the humane treatment of animals that were in place in the U.S.
There are appear to be many more horses suffering from neglect (usually starvation) or painful, lingering lameness that there once were. This was compounded in the mid-west by the high cost of hay. I have heard several rumors of horses being abandoned in parks in Texas and/or Kentucky. I believe these are urban legends as I’ve yet to see an actual news article about it.
I hope Eight Belles’ death will make a difference in racing. It makes a direct difference in racing to the very minimal degree I’m involved, which is as a spectator and bettor, in that I’m not going to watch the sport anymore.
We can debate larger issues of animal cruelty and entertainment at length, it doesn’t change the fact that, regardless of those issues, IMO we have an obligation to all animals to NOT overbreed them to such a degree that to put them to their intended use causes them illness, pain, or death. Dogs bred into smash-faced mutants that can’t breathe; cattle bred into beef machines so heavy they can’t walk; horses bred with legs so delicate they can’t run. I don’t give a shit about the legalities of it; I find it morally reprehensible to intentionally make animals unhealthy in order to make them faster, fatter, cuter, or to over-extend any other single unnecessary trait.
And I think it’s hugely damaging to the sport. Americans tolerate and enjoy animal sports with the assumption – sometimes the willfully delusional assumption – that “no animals were harmed in the creation of this entertainment!” Again, I’m not courting a debate as to whether or not that’s actually true, but Americans need to be able to at least believe it is true, and I include myself in that number. The vast majority of your audience is not going to continue to tune in to see the animals collapse and die at the end of the event. Your horse is so fragile that after you ran it flat-out for a mile and a quarter, you broke not one but TWO of its legs? “Sport of Kings,” my ass. They can have it. I’ll take my quinella bet and put it on the PowerBall.
When I was learning to ride the instructors actually did whack our thighs with a standard riding crop i.e. whip so we would have some idea what it felt like. For the most part, we seldom had to use one, as most well trained horses will respond to a shift in weight and balance. When we did use one, a very light flick on the hindquarter was more than sufficient to let the horse know you wanted more speed. Horses do like to run, and if one doesn’t want to run there is almost always something wrong.
The crops used in horse racing can sting, but they aren’t raising welts and they aren’t drawing blood. With the jockey riding above the horse most of the race there are few ways for horse and rider to communicate. Jockeys also routinely report the need to hold a horse back to keep it from running itself to exhaustion too early in the race. Jockeys are not sadists - a jockey that injures horses will soon be out of a job permanently.
Of course, “riding crop” doesn’t have the emotional load of “whip” - hence when someone wants to stir the pot they use the latter and not the former word.
In other words, someone broke the rules, mistreated the horse and was punished for it. Where is the problem here? Yes, abuses occur in any industry - that’s why we have rules, laws, and punishments. Horse racing, for centuries, has had the reputation of treating the animals involved better than the human jockeys and grooms.
And frankly, I resented that article implying that all riding stables and schools were pestilential hellholes. When I worked at one we worked damn hard to take care of those horses. They were well fed, worked enough stay healthy, rested when appropriate, and groomed daily. Our horses regularly lived into their 20’s - which abused, overworked horses usually don’t. They were seen by farrier every six weeks (more often if someone threw a shoe), and a few of them needed special shoes for foot problems (we had one filly with deformed feet - without shoes she could hobble painfully, with “orthopedic” shoes she could comfortably run and be a normal horse, although we did not use her for jumping, ever) but we paid the extra money to keep them sound and healthy. There were regular vet checkups. Animals that got sick or injured were treated and rested until they could return to work, and returned to work gradually to re-adjust to a full work schedule.
Mistreatment was not tolerated.
Yes, we did sometimes have to put an animal down. That’s part of owning animals. A vet was called in on such occasions and it was done as humanely as possible. That’s far preferable to letting an animal that can’t recover from illness or injury suffer for no damn good reason.
I was responding to the previous claim that ‘horses will run only when it is absolutely necessary’; giving anecdotal evidence showing that the claim was untrue. I fail to see how your comment is relevant to this discussion.
Its relevant if comparing the running horses do on their own to running a race. If your post was aimed at earlier post saying horses do not like to run, I must have missed that and apologize.
Sorry if I wasn’t clear. I don’t give a shit whether people give a shit about losing my respect or not. No cowardly tactics here - just stating an opinion.
Let me say right off that I wish race horses were held back another year, allowing them to be more physically mature before intensive racing. Our hunters and dressage mounts do not see a saddle before age 3, and few are worked intensively until a year or two later. Perhaps this may contribute to longevity and extended usefullness.
But perhaps not. I guess the argument could be made that most race horses, by a huge margin, do not have catastrophic breakdowns even when raced as two year olds. Statistics seem to be in favor of the status quo.
The loss of Eight Belles is truly sad, and no less so as a statistical outlier. But the assertion offered up-thread, that racehorses are being deliberately bred to break down, is incorrect. Or, providing some nuance, being over-bred for speed without a mind to overall fitness. First and foremost, in an admittedly money driven industry, such would be pure financial foolishness. If all, or even many, of your horses break down, you will not be long a horse racer.
It also fails to recognize the complexity of “speed” in a racehorse. There are so many factors involved in ultimate speed, and these factors are present in such variation in any given sire and dam, that no breeding can hope to produce genuinely predictable results. Horse breeders do certainly attempt to maintain desirable characteristics from one parent and add other desirable characteristics from the other parent into their offspring, but this is far more art than science. Successful breeders breed “best to best” and hope for a good result. In a forced Darwinian system, the inevitable variation produced is then culled, and only a certain few even make it to a race track at all. Most of the remainder are sold, at good prices, as riding mounts for a host of other disciplines.
Whips as a cruelty issue is incongruous to anyone who has ever trained a horse. It is impossible to damage a horse with a riding crop, or even to cause it more than minor transient discomfort. I will not call it pain. Ever see a horse kick or bite another horse? THAT can be painful as well as damaging. Watch a mare bite her foal on the neck to control its behavior. Nothing a human can do with a wispy wand even comes close. We are able to influence a horse’s behavior with a riding whip only because horses are born followers, and domestication has selected for horses that are willing to follow humans as herd leaders. Our commands, given in a variety of ways (everything from body language, hands to bit, seat and legs, and other tools like the whip) are accepted and acted upon by the well trained horse. But it would be foolish indeed to attempt to actually coerce behavior out of an unwilling horse using any of these.
My wife’s 2 year old (sport horse, not race horse) is being ground schooled (no saddle, no rider) rather complex commands with a whip, most of which involve no bodily contact at all. He has learned to move off when the whip is swept near his flank, to speed up when the whip is jigged up and down, to halt when the whip is raised overhead, to follow the end of the whip with his nose like a “contact point”, and more. Nothing coercive, and certainly nothing painful. So whips can have a much broader role than simply instruments of torture.
You act like this happens all of the time. The vet at the track said that in the 30+ years he’s been doing this he’s never seen something like that happens.
These owners literally spend millions of dollars per horse. They have an enormous interest in keeping them healthy and very much alive. Eight Belles had the potential to win the triple crown. How much money will she earn the owners now?
To say that horse owners and breeders are responsible for this is ridiculous. There is so much money at stake that they would do everything they could NOT to have this happen…
We are part of the ‘natural environment’. We ain’t the only creatures that impact the environment – sometimes to the benefit of another species, sometimes to its detriment.
You got a complaint?
You can file it with Og/God/other
or tell it to ‘nature’. There is no ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ in nature. Stuff happens and we call that ‘natural processes’. Well, we are part of the natural processes. If we destroy a forest, that’s nature. If we breed horses to run, that’s nature.
Nuclear weapons? Nature.
are you saying selective breeding doesn’t occur? Surely you’re not.
OK 
I’m sure he may not have seen two shattered ankles on one horse before, but if he’s saying he’s never seen a horse have to be put down for catastrophic stress-related leg injuries, he needs to get out more. I don’t know anyone who would seriously argue that the horses would not be better off if they were run at an older age – even if only one year older – or for a shorter course, or in sex-specific races (not mixing fillies and colts), or with more attention paid to soundness for what they are actually being expected to do. But if each individual horse is not being treated cruelly, it’s like the industry is willing to turn a blind eye to the problem overbreeding causes in the sport as a whole and say it was a fluke or fate. “Fate” my ass; it’s the same degree of fate that means many French Bulldogs cannot give birth naturally, because the mutant big heads of the puppies no longer fit through the mother’s birth canal. They are breeding them that way.
And breeders and owners will NOT “do everything they can” to prevent this from happening. To be more specific, they won’t stop breeding and training for speed – big-chested horses with toothpick legs, ran hard and ran young. It’s another example of the “tragedy of the commons” – as long as MY gamble pays off and MY over-bred money machine doesn’t collapse at the track, I’m willing the take the risk that YOURS might.
It’s not like this is an amazing new problem people haven’t been talking about for some time. And it’s not like horse racing is the only place you see it, or that it’s even limited to non-human animals. Hell, you see it in “women’s” gymnastics and figure skating – and I put the word “women” in quotes advisedly, since both are becoming sports of underfed, overmuscled nine-year-olds who – surprise! – are being injured by repeatedly doing physical tasks their bodies are not designed to do.
So yes, breeders and owners are responsible for it. If over-breeding is a concern – and I’m hardly to only person to think that it is – who else would be responsible?
But they’re just doing what they love to do-
*One study reported in the Equine Veterinary Journal noted a doubling of one type of heart murmur and a tripling of another in 2-year-olds after 9 months of training. Horses’ heartbeats can increase tenfold during a race, from a relaxed 25 beats per minute to an excessive 250 beats, leading to exhaustion, collapse, and sometimes, to a fatal heart attack.
Researchers found gastric ulcers in ninety-three percent of horses in race training. In horses that had actually raced, the incidence was a staggering one hundred percent.
A study in the Equine Veterinary Journal found hemorrhaging in the lungs in 95% of horses checked during two post-race examinations. An article in the Veterinary Clinics of North America: Equine Practice Journal states that hemorrhaging in the lungs is “a condition affecting virtually all horses during intense exercise worldwide….there is no treatment that is considered a panacea, and the currently allowed treatments have not proven to be effective.” Another study in the Equine Veterinary Journal noted that as long as a horse continues to undergo training and racing, the lungs cannot heal. *