breakdowns
 

saw this on espn...

if horse racing is going to survive, this needs to be changed.

A recent Associated Press survey found that thoroughbred racetracks in the U.S. reported more than three horse deaths a day last year and 5,000 since 2003, and the vast majority were put down after suffering devastating injuries on the track.


http://sports.espn.go.com/sports/hor...ory?id=3455452

Don't believe everything you read.

Your news cycle is about a week old.

The number is understated, not overstated. Some of the smaller tracks don't keep records.

There is no getting around this point. The breakdowns must stop or the game faces banishment.

Post of the year. You going to wave a magic wand and make them suddenly stop? Let us know your solution to the problem. We can figure out your agenda.

The number also includes horses that were injured training, got colic, foundered, had heart attacks, etc.

I would think your banishment may be the first sign

Don't know why I'm asking, but how many breakdowns annually will result in 'banishment'? I'm asking because I think that 'zero tolerance' for breakdowns may be a difficult target to achieve or maintain. Could be just me... I may be wrong...

they should also "banish" farms that have accidents which result in horses dying....like Lane's End last winter when their yearlings got into the road and were hit by cars. Obviously they are not qualified to run a farm.

I think they are only talking about horses that die of injuries. There was a much more in-depth article about this in the Los Angeles Times a couple of weeks ago and I'm almost positive that they were only talking about horses that broke down and had to be put down. I don't think that horses that died of colic were included in these numbers.

I just read the article again. It's not totally clear to me if something like colic was included in these numbers or not. I don't think that something like colic was included but I can't be sure. Here is the article:

http://www.latimes.com/sports/la-sp-...,5376291.story

A lot of the states and tracks included all horses who died, not just in races. I heard that some of the info was "educated guesses" by tracks that didnt have the info.

They definitely included horses that broke down in the morning.

So when a story makes mistakes and says things that arent correct we should just shut up? I didnt know this story was making the rounds in elementary schools across the nation. i mean it isnt like that purple dinosaur was involved.

Agreement here is that none of us want to see horses die due to injury.


I'm all for exploration and research of anything that would assure fewer track breakdowns, and am totally willing to asterisk any lines of demarcation on track records to account for changes in practices, with any and all associated with breeding, training and racing.

We're not speed freak fans.

We're sports fans, horse fans and gamblers. And I've been with hardened gamblers when a horse went down, causing them to deal with at least a brief moment of personal pain and sorrow.

I know little if anything about breeding, training or anything that might increase the fragility of a race horse.

But I want the message to ring loud and clear that I support anything that will lessen my worry about going to a live race track out of concern I might see a horse die that day.

Well said. The unfortunate thing is that horses breaking down is a complex problem with all kinds of factors both internal and external, none of which is easy to quantify or measure.

Weren't the seven year olds in 1950 or 1965 or 1980 "racing's future" at those times? It isn't like there weren't racetrack fatalities in those decades to explain as well. Somehow the sport survived.
I understand that the culture is slightly different now with regards to animals than it was in some past decades, but people having to explain to kids what happened to a horse that just broke down is sadly - like the breakdowns themselves - one of the enduring and unpleasant aspects of this otherwise wonderful game.
Should people in the game work to reduce the number of racetrack fatalities? Absolutely. But eliminating them altogether is beyond impossible.

3 horses a day??? Thats all? How many dogs get put down a day???? well its sure helluva lot more than three and the vast majority of the dogs put down are done by the SPCA