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Originally Posted by Merlinsky
Never going to happen. It's easy for folks to make rules about other people's horses but the cost of upkeep is too high to force benching and what if the horse gets hurt at age 2? It could be argued it's good to keep them out of the gene pool but it's not always soundness, sometimes it's a freak accident. Big Brown's insurance premium, as I understood it, was $3 million. Say they could get no more races out of him so he didn't run at age 4 but they had to continue to pay insurance, bills, etc. All you end up doing is pushing people out of the business. It means only the wealthier folks can afford to keep up in the sport. Between people wanting to keep them off the track at age 2 and others wanting them to have to wait longer to breed, well it's too financially difficult and instead of improving fan excitement, the industry falls apart from within. Lets also not forget the idea that you can't force someone to keep their horse on the track. They might decide the only way to make money is to keep pushing them so they can get purses, rather than let them lay up to get over battle scars and not make any money. I mean if they can't sell to breed in the US, they're gonna find a way to do it somehow. Might sell overseas where they don't have those rules and voila, our best are sent out of the country without a moment's notice. They might just start leasing to Japan, Australia or South America until they're 5 but that's best case scenario. I don't think it's wrong to take breeders into account here. No breeders, no horse.
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And as I said, I didn't see it ever happening, either. I think you missed what I was saying- it doesn't have anything to do with racing at 2 (I still don't get why non-racing fans are wailing about that- did they not read [i]Seabiscuit?[i]
). I also doubt owners with a horse with serious stallion potential are going to push the horse and risk injury. Absolutely you're right that they might just lay the horse up for 2 years, but then they have to risk the horse being forgotten, so that's a decision they'd have to make.
And yes, it's a genuine possibility they'd go to South American, Japan, whatever, but those horses wouldn't be able to race in the US, so would it be worth it to the breeders? I don't know.
I agree with you- keeping the commercial breeding industry happy is the name of the game for the Jockey Club (why else would they not permit artificial insemination, if not to keep stud farms in business?). But the
point of the thread, I believe, was, what would be a workable incentive to keep the top horses on the track? In my opinion, though, as I said, I think this will never happen, the only way to do it would be to restrict breeding age to 5 and up. It has nothing to do with breeding a sounder horse, only to do with "what would keep them on the track at 4?"
I think we saw a good example this year with Curlin- I was, as a fan, delighted Jackson brought him back, but I really doubt he would have had the legal issues surrounding him been cleared up last year.
So, Merlinsky, what do you think would keep horses on the track at 4? As a defender of the breeding industry, if your assignment was to make running top horses at 4 more attractive than retiring them, what would you propose?
I'm glad you answered- I thought Danzig started a fun thread and it's nice to keep discussing it!