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Originally Posted by Phalaris1913
(continued from previous post)
If you have a horse who is already unsound, of course you do not race or train. You put him away until he's right and spend the time it's going to take before he's ready to approach speed work again. (That could be several months if he's gone more than a month or so without work at near top speed.) If he's never going to be reasonably right, given that most athletes of any description have minor issues, retire him. If his career was shortened by inherent problems that may be congenital, geld him. But it's dead wrong that avoiding high speed work is the way to prevent injury in the horse. You want to prevent athletic injury in the racehorse? Don't race him. If you are going to race a horse, you are morally obligated to use only specimens who can handle the demand and then train them in an appropriate manner to do that which we ask of them, and researchers tell us that nothing prepares a horse for high speed work except high speed work.
There is nothing more important in all of horse racing than to ensure the best possible safety for its equine participants. Without horses who can competently and safely race, there is no horse racing. No sport. No gambling vehicle, nothing. And the horses have no say about their involvement; they can do nothing but rely upon us to do the right thing by them. It's inexcusable to pursue policies which either directly or indirectly result in increased injury risk to racehorses. It is impossible to construct a humane argument supporting a practice which ultimately causes more horses to get hurt than some other alternate practice. If ever it can be demonstrated a given practice correlates to more injury than some other practice, those of us in any position to study the matter are obligated to investigate, and, if necessary, recommend the abandonment of - or at least seriously question - bad practices.
Is that all ivory-tower stuff? You bet. Here in the real world, money matters more than the risk of racehorses getting hurt and there are a lot of practices that are likely detrimental to horses which are all about lining pockets. Until those practices no longer bring in the money, there will be little impetus to change them. I can stand here and shout in the darkness for the rest of my natural life to no avail if that doesn't happen. But I know that I'm doing the right thing by looking for answers and speaking up when I think I have something to contribute.
I am often accused of being on the side of trying to break down horses because I realize that among other things, light racing schedules are associated with injury-shortened careers. Yes, that could be because physically troubled animals are raced less often, but it doesn't explain - if racing is inherently destructive to horses - why sounder horses that race more often are not necessarily compromised by their more strenuous campaigns. I've been studying this problem for over 15 years and I still don't have an answer. I am always working on studying various risk factors to refine what is, and isn't, likely to be part of the problem. (I just discovered last night, for example, that over a recent nine-year period, horses which are destined to break down in a race average about a month younger in age than the general population when they have their first start in a race at a distance more than a mile.) But what is definitely part of the problem is refusal to accept that there is a problem, that it's getting worse, and that it could possibly be associated with any of an endless list of changes that have occurred since there was less of a problem. When most people realize that they're on the wrong road, they turn around and go back to look for where they made a wrong turn. In horse racing, no one seems remotely interested in where the wrong turn was, or where the right road is now - they just keep on going, or even turn off in new, even more wrong, directions, while inventing new destinations as they go to justify their actions. It's astonishing how many people who do sincerely care for the welfare of the horse are so dead-set on persevering with methods that seem comparatively less successful at keeping racehorses safe and sound. And I'm the bad guy (er, girl). Go figure.
Theoretically, knowing that horses are perfectly capable of much more than we ask of them today, the fact that so many of them are too unsound to train or run indicates a problem. In a horse without predisposing physical issues, that problem very possibly lies in the training, racing and other preparation to which it was subjected before that unsoundness surfaced. Although I have come to some conclusions of what are good ideas and what aren't, I'm not a horse trainer and I'm not going to lecture on what training should be. However, the people who trained the horses on the lists above are horse trainers and while most of them are not alive today to tell us their views, ample records exist for us to inspect and theorize how these - and countless other horses of lesser repute - did just fine through campaigns some would have us believe are impossible.
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