I pit NBC's coverage of the Kentucky Derby in the wake of Eight Belles' death

The BBQ Pit
101

[QUOTE=Bricker]
Oh, wait. That must be a prairie dog on Bizarro World, your home planet. Here on Earth, a hole can appear in a day, so even if you “walk weekly” you cannot guarantee holes don’t appear.
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We have raptors and fox, therefore we no longer have substantive prairie dog action here. YMMV, considering your inestimable mental picture of my land.

Ooh, taxonomy. One of my favorite hobbies. What about small-brained, two-legged, cloven-hooved and swathed in seersucker? Around here we call 'em North American Land Leech.

I have mentioned in the past that I have built a 1/4-mile track here on the property. Yet when I release my horses onto said track, I can’t say they’ve ever just raced each other around it. Seriously, how can you draw equivalence between a horse’s joyous fart kick and being whipped by a little person who’s nesting on a horse’s back?

I invite you to visit our Bookcliffs to see the wild herds up there. There are plenty of old glueys just hanging out year-round. It’s quite something to see them.

Please see my response to tbonham.

We are either the stewards of this world or its ultimate plague. I want us to be the good guys, and that’s pretty much it.

102

[QUOTE=CannyDan]
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.
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Without disagreeing with the facts nor the general tone of this post, I’d like to point out that one of the signs that a strain is being over-bred in any animal will be when the products of that strain or line start to experience above-normal rates of defects. (Using the most general term I can think of, covering not simply accidents such as what happened to Eight Belles, but other conditions that would keep a given horse from being a potential racer.) Let’s be completely cold-blooded here, and call it negative feedback. Marginal breeding strategies will often continue being used, even if the benefit is barely measurable, without such negative feedback incidents to emphasize that the point of diminishing returns has been passed.

Within one generation (two at most) descendants of Native Dancer, that were seen as the products of highly successful breedings, have suffered catastrophic injuries. Unlike PETA, my inclination is to assume that the jockeys involved were acting completely within the guidelines of their obligations to care for the horse, as well as trying to win. In which case, it seems to me that the obvious conclusion would be that, especially for a breed with as “narrow” a bloodline as Thoroughbreds, it is probably time to reduce the use of that strain.

I do disagree with your claim that over-breeding doesn’t happen. I agree that it’s not done deliberately, but it seems to me that there’s some empirical evidence to support the conclusion that, with this strain, the point when we can say that a the line for over-breeding is happening may have been passed.

103

[QUOTE=Wee Bairn]

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.

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I’m no vet, but I’ve been doing some research. Your uncited article fails to mention that there’s several studies, each proposing a range of possible incidences of gastric ulceration.

It’s perhaps unsurprising that they go for the highest (most shocking) statistic, given that they make no pretense of unbiased reporting, but the lower end estimates aren’t that shocking—53% incidence in racehorses compared to 40% in leisure horses.

Then again, I have no knowledge of veterinary medicine (other than what I’ve leeched from my two flatmates).

104

[QUOTE=Wee Bairn]
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. *
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Heart attack is virtually unheard of in horses, and other domestic animals. Being fit reduces heart rate in all species (including humans), but does not lead to heart disease.

Actually, once a “bleeder” always a “bleeder”, resting a horse for 3 years once he’s bled probably won’t change anything the first time he comes back onto the track. The lungs “heal” by having the high pressure bronchial artery circulation take over supplying the lungs instead of the low pressure pulmonary circulation. That is a permanate anatomic change.

105

[QUOTE=Long Time First Time]
Heart attack is virtually unheard of in horses, and other domestic animals.
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Well… I know of an instance where a horse (pony, actually) had a heart attack. A barn next to the paddock caught fire, the equines (as equines will do) panicked, and the particular animal in question got stuck in a fence while fleeing and, trapped next to a burning building, died of a heart attack. But that was a freak sort of thing.

106

[QUOTE=Broomstick]
How do you square this with Barbaro’s owners stating multiple times that they would keep the horse even if he was unable to breed, run, or be ridden so long as the horse was not in pain?
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That came out much, MUCH later, after it was clear Barbaro was going to be nothing more than a barnyard pet. If you think for one moment that the syndicate’s initial, post-injury business plan involved either “$5 for a picture with Babaro” or “We’re trying to further equine veterinarian medicine” you’re deluded. Each and every news story that came out in the first few weeks and months after his injury mentioned potential stud fees. It wasn’t until after it was crystal clear he wouldn’t be able to stand at stud that the “we LOVE this horse and must save him” soundbites came out.

Regarding the other back-and-forth in this thread, I really don’t have much opinion one way or the other. Horses run and jump; they’re naturally built for those activities, and that’s why we two-leggers use them for those activities. Racing and running, in and of itself, is not bad for the animal. What is bad for horses is - even beyond the inbreeding - the insistence on breeding for speed without an equal amount of integrity regarding endurance.

Look, let’s take a high-profile example of another horse. Zara Phillips keeps winning 3-day events on a horse named Toytown. 3-day events are considerably more strenuous than flat races - they involve a cross-country event; a day of dressage; and another day of show-jumping. Toytown is not only fast enough to win; he’s also strong enough to withstand the strenuous jumping involved.

Toytown is sixteen years old.

And, yeah, sometimes horses do break bones in those events, but overall it seems that when horses are bred for bones instead of speed the kill ratio seems to favor (er…or doom, depending on how you look at it) the riders.

107

[QUOTE=Wee Bairn]
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?
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I got a “popper” with my first horse, a stiff handle with two wide, flexible, leather flappy bits. It scared the shit out of me.

“You think I should use this on my horse?”
“Go ahead, hit yourself with it.”

So I did.

Then I hit myself a little harder.

Then I hit myself REALLY hard. Ok, that hurt.

My horse had a habit of “puffing” when I saddled her - she’d expand her lungs so the girth wouldn’t fit tight resulting in saddle slip. I’d slap her on the ass with my hand, hard, and she’d let out her lungs so I could tighten it up.

Then I slapped my leg as hard as I had slapped her ass. Then I slapped my thigh as hard as I did with the popper.

I didn’t worry about hurting my horse with the popper anymore, and after getting my hands on a real jockey whip I didn’t worry about that anymore, either.

108

[QUOTE=Scumpup]
A horse is dead. Big deal.
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Can we flog it?

109

[QUOTE=chique]
That came out much, MUCH later, after it was clear Barbaro was going to be nothing more than a barnyard pet. If you think for one moment that the syndicate’s initial, post-injury business plan
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Barbaro wasn’t owned by a “syndicate”. He was owned by a husband and wife, Roy and Gretchen Jackson, not some corporate entity.

Your implication of selfish greed is also somewhat contradicted by the Jacksons setting up a memorial fund to research a cure for laminitis in his honor. Oh, yes, THAT smacks of unbridled, selfish greed. :rolleyes:

While I found quotes from his trainer, Michael Matz, and a vet, Larry Brambridge, regarding keeping Barbaro as a stud animal I could not find any early quotes from his owners, that is, the Jacksons, the people who made the actual decisions about the animal. Are you able to produce a quote from after the accident where the owners are going on and on about his potential value as stud?

110

[QUOTE=El Cid Viscoso]
We are either the stewards of this world or its ultimate plague. I want us to be the good guys, and that’s pretty much it.
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Uh huh.

[QUOTE=El Cid Viscoso]
We have raptors and fox, therefore we no longer have substantive prairie dog action here.
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Oh, the horror! Your stewardship has resulted in the genocide of the prairie dog in your area! How can you call yourself a good steward?

In fact, if you’re keeping horses at all, in any capacity, you’ve messed with the natural order of things, since it was evil rotten humanity who reintroduced the species to North America following its unexplained (but undoubtedly perfectly natural) die-off on this continent 10,000 years ago.

The lesson, of course, is exactly what I said earlier: while we should certainly work against gratuitous cruelty, horses are animals, and, as we do all other animals, humans use horses for our benefit. That’s what comes from being at the top of the food chain and the evolutionary ladder.

111

Bricker, that’s one way to look it at, or you could look at it as since humans are at the top of the evolutionary chain, it should be their responsilbity to take care of those animals who are beneath them- you know, help those that can’t help themselves.

112

[QUOTE=Wee Bairn]
Bricker, that’s one way to look it at, or you could look at it as since humans are at the top of the evolutionary chain, it should be their responsilbity to take care of those animals who are beneath them- you know, help those that can’t help themselves.
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:rolleyes:

113

[QUOTE=Wee Bairn]
Bricker, that’s one way to look it at, or you could look at it as since humans are at the top of the evolutionary chain, it should be their responsilbity to take care of those animals who are beneath them- you know, help those that can’t help themselves.
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Why?

Again – I have absolutely acknowledged that gratuitous cruelty is not being defended here. So apart from that – why should humans “look after” animals that can’t help themselves?

Pets. The strident animals rights advocate would compare the keeping of pets to slavery. But even if you don’t accept that view, I’d say it’s obvious we keep pets primarily for our benefit, not for the benefit of the pet. Few people will say, “I don’t like my pet, but it needs me, so I’ll adopt it and keep it.” I don’t say it doesn’t happen, but you’ll surely agree that’s not the common pet-keeping model.

Service animals. Obviously even more for the benefit of the keeper, and not an altruistic gesture.

Food animals. No explanation necessary.

So-- why?

114

[QUOTE=Scissorjack]
Can we flog it?
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An old webpage dealing with flogging dead horses: http://www.scc.net/~t-bonham/O-DEADHO.HTM

115

[QUOTE=Bricker]
That’s what comes from being at the top of the food chain…
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A few years back I was at a zoo and a tiger, thinking I looked like a tasty morsel, jumped at his enclosure’s bars to get at me. That took away any thoughts that people were alone at the top of the food chain: had he gotten through he’d’ve eaten me while, had I an AK-47, we’d’ve been better matched. (thinking) No, he was too close and had the drop on me. I’d be toast.

116

[QUOTE=Broomstick]
Barbaro wasn’t owned by a “syndicate”. He was owned by a husband and wife, Roy and Gretchen Jackson, not some corporate entity.
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Yup, blew it there did I. Apologies.

Don’t think I’m ignoring this; I simply haven’t yet had the time to listen to all the NPR segments that are still online. Given that I have a memory like a sieve I’d normally say “oops, fucked up again…”, just like I did at the start of this post. The problem is that a week or two after the Derby a fellow volunteer and I listened to the same story on the radio on the drive in to the chapter, resulting in an incredulous “They want to breed him? Seriously?!” conversation. We continued that conversation (in that way you do when you only see someone once a month) every time we saw each other until he was finally put down.

If the conversation hadn’t happened I wouldn’t have remembered the story, but it did and I do. Uhh…would you take Janice’s email address in lieu of a link? :stuck_out_tongue:

117

My aunt and cousins actually own and race horses at a local and regional level (they’ve raced at Churchill Downs, but not at the Derby). They are horse lovers through and through. We visit them a few times a year and I have absolutely no issues with the way their animals are taken care of. In fact, we should all have such devoted caretakers.

However, being in the racing industry, they know owners, trainers, and jockeys who are NOT ethical. They know people who’ve drugged their horses, or other people’s horses in the quest to give them an edge in a race. They know trainers who rule their horses by fear and intimidation. They know jockeys who whip other horses in the middle of the race. They know owners who continue to race horses that bleed out. (Some horses have a problem with their noses bleeding after running.)

Like all sports, there are good owners and there are crappy owners. The question is if you’d risk throwing out the baby with the bathwater. If racing were banned tomorrow, my aunt wouldn’t be able to afford to keep most of her horses. Feed is too expensive and they are very, very high maintenance animals. So in your zeal to protect the horses, you’d ensure that an entire generation of horses would be tossed away.

118

[QUOTE=Bricker]
… its unexplained (but undoubtedly perfectly natural) die-off on this continent 10,000 years ago.
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Jury appears to be out on this. There’s considerable thought that humans had something to do with this die-off - and there are also theories that don’t include humans in the cause.

119

[QUOTE=Wee Bairn]
Bricker, that’s one way to look it at, or you could look at it as since humans are at the top of the evolutionary chain, it should be their responsilbity to take care of those animals who are beneath them- you know, help those that can’t help themselves.
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Help which ones, though? The poor, misunderstood mosquitoes? The unfortunate, helpful bacteria on your hands that you’re about to wash away? Or the white tailed deer crowding out their habitats in the NE United States?

Even discounting those kinds of examples, how do you balance that kind of a principle?

120

[QUOTE=Crocodiles And Boulevards]
Help which ones, though? The poor, misunderstood mosquitoes? The unfortunate, helpful bacteria on your hands that you’re about to wash away? Or the white tailed deer crowding out their habitats in the NE United States?

Even discounting those kinds of examples, how do you balance that kind of a principle?
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Help the ones with a functional brain, for starters, but even then, I don’t recommend saving the animals if a pack of wild gorillas comes into town and starts terrorizing the populace- you shouldn’t harm man or let man suffer to protect an animal. I just don’t see the need to casue them harm by racing them for our entertainment.

PunditLisa, you make it sound like without horse racing, horses wouldn’t exist. Here’s a novel idea- horses as pets, no different than dogs or cats, without making them race!

Bricker- I don’t know of any pet owner who doesn’t want a pet, period, but who has one for the sake of the animal at the detriment of themselves. I know some who have more pets than they want if they find another one in need, but none who have them as a truly altrusitic endeavor. They’d be wrong if they did, morally, kinda, if they weren’t giving the pet a loving home.

Yes, pet owners get a benefit from their pet- protection, friendship, whatever- but the pet benefits as well in getting a friend and family and happy loving life. Pet ownership is a win-win situation for all, its not like people have pets for selfish reasons, usually.

Sure guide dogs serve the owner, but again, the guide dogs I’ve seen seem to enjoy their work, and still receive the same love and care that regular pets do- its not like service animals are sewing wallets 18 hours a day, they’re usually assisting someone walk and perform simple tasks, nothing that causes any problems for the animal, and they get a friend in return. Dogs choose to align themselves with man, and are happier when they do so.

As for why? Why not cause harm to an animal for entertainment? Because its cruel and unnecessary?