OT: Horse Racing

It is a lot more complicated than that. It is not like horses are that much faster from the last 100 years of breeding just the tracks are faster. Horses have been bred for speed for 3000 years and the lighter boned oldest breed, the Arabian, is the major racing breed in a lot of countries and do not have the number of injuries. Nor do the racing arabs in this country have a high percentage of injuries. They also are the premere endurance horse.

The thoroughbred has been bred for speed since 1690 when Byerley brought home the eastern bred stallion he rode in the crusades to cross on the British race horses. Followed by 2 arabian stallions that founded the breed crossed on native mares.

But recently there has been a difernce. Some of the breeding on of injury prone horses (if that is the cause over the track differences from the rest of the world) may be the very advanced care designed to help keep them safe and healthy. More suppliments, drugs to promote healing, early detection of problems, regular x-rays and cat scans of their legs and so the ability to prevent lameness from things like shin sprints that would have in the past have sent them back to the farm or made them slower. No race wins and they would not have bred on. But now they do not breed away from those problems because they are winning despite of that. Look at Big Brown and his terrible feet, he will produce 60 foals a year when in the past a horse with his foot problems might never have been raced and certainly would not have been in the derby with $600 glued on shoes invented just for that horse nor in the Belmont with a repaired with wire and plastic quarter crack.

Hard to back off the great care in order to improve future generations by letting horses break down now. And mare owners will not worry as much about Big Browns feet as much as what his yearlings will sell for.

I am not in the mood to argue flushing a lump of frozen cells down a sink as 'putting down babies" but think on this. Look around the world, cultures that do not care about and treat animals humanely have the very worse human rights records. The chinese literally skin dogs and cats alive and make cute toys for your foster kids to play with...

The history of the awareness of humane treatment for animals and especially the laws not allowing people to work horses to death is often closely followed by increased awareness of human and especially child labor abuse. In 1906 after 17000 horses died in harness in 7 months rebuilding San Francisco the humane groups that formed were the same people that fought against child labor.