Squires strong NYT sports blog piece

[Kasept]

Jim Squires, (Monarchos breeder; author of A Horse of a Different Color), with a very strong piece in the NY Times Sunday that I missed until this morning...

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/05/sp...ss&oref=slogin

Horses break their legs running across pastures with no one on their backs. Whether wild or domesticated, they race with one another and often try so hard they hurt themselves. They run through fences. They kick each other regularly, often breaking their own legs and those of others. They, too, have to be euthanized. Horses who never saw a racetrack in their lives founder regularly from mysterious causes and end up like Barbaro.

They develop colic and die regularly in our barns, in our trailers on the way to clinics, on operating tables after they get there, and sometimes even after they return home with $30,000 medical bills. Foals are frequently born dead. Mares often die trying to give birth. In short, losing animals is an integral part of raising them. Breeders, owners and trainers spend a great deal of time in emergency rooms and disposing of carcasses. People just don’t see it on television.

[hoovesupsideyourhead]

as of last night..77 eight belles rip tribs on youtube.over /under 102

[Danzig]

yeah, the new york times and washington post won't care about a mare who ruptures an aorta during foaling..
but that's the thing, in a way peta is after all of that, as they want no exploitation of animals at all...and if we own any animals, we're exploiting them-according to them. absolutely ridiculous. i wonder if my dog feels exploited about the fact she hasn't got to do any more hunting for food than walking to her bowl?

[GenuineRisk]

Originally Posted by Danzig

yeah, the new york times and washington post won't care about a mare who ruptures an aorta during foaling..
but that's the thing, in a way peta is after all of that, as they want no exploitation of animals at all...and if we own any animals, we're exploiting them-according to them. absolutely ridiculous. i wonder if my dog feels exploited about the fact she hasn't got to do any more hunting for food than walking to her bowl?

Oh yeah, right; it's all the liberal media's fault. Did you read the piece?

Thanks for the link, Steve; I wouldn't have seen it otherwise. A few things it leaves me wondering- in every piece I've read about this (some sympathetic to horse racing, some less so) is that they all bring up the racing at 2 thing. Racing at 2 isn't a new thing, and in fact, two-year-olds start later now than they did decades ago, right? Maybe it's a bad comparison, as it's not a sport with a great PR record, either, but it reminds me of women's gymnastics, where a fully grown adult can't go into the sport because there's been too much of a loss of the physical attributes needed for the sport by the time a person is fully grown. I was under the impression the early training affects the development of the racehorse's physique, enabling him to continue to run. Is that wrong?

I also don't understand him arguing for fewer starts for racehorses- isn't part of the reason they run less often that they're more fragile now, and the horse who has run several times is usually a sounder animal?

It just seems to me that the problem is breeding for precocious speed, and that fewer starts, not racing at 2, synthetic tracks, all of it, are just treatments for the cause, because that's cheaper than addressing the cause, which would require a huge shift in breeding practices.

In the end, this will be a lot of screaming and yelling for nothing. States want the gambling revenue, so they have no motivation to change racing, and racing is run by breeding, so there's no motivation to change things there, either.

But I'm not a racehorse breeder, like the author of this piece, nor an owner or trainer, so I may likely be missing something here. Wouldn't be the first time...

[Better Than Honour]

I respect your posting but you leave out quite a bit of the piece. What you posted is true and obviously the crazy PETA people are just that, crazy.

However you leave out the most important parts of the piece.

"The thoroughbred horse is one of God’s most magnificent and willing creatures, and unfortunately, self-destructive enough by nature. They don’t need all this help from those of us who love them."

"We can also shift the focus of veterinary medicine. Medications that mask injuries and weaknesses must be controlled strictly and uniformly in all racing jurisdictions, and regulators should be adequately funded by the industry if government cannot do so. We should quit trying to quick-cure problems in time for the race."

[sumitas]

Another section ommitted

"The thoroughbred horse is one of the most fragile creatures on earth, an animal with a heart and a metabolism too powerful for his bones, digestive and respiratory systems, one too heavy and too strong for the structure supporting it.

That condition has taken decades of evolution. I don’t know what to do about it, except try to breed better ones to reverse the trend. The concern about the safety of our racetracks is also legitimate. People are trying to do something about that. It is indisputable that more catastrophic injuries occur on dirt surfaces — too often on the pitifully few days that the world is paying attention to our sport.

We can either make our tracks safer or continue to shock and dismay our audience and pay the consequences."

[Kasept]

Truly unbelievable... Nothing is 'ommitted'...

I would have reprinted the entire piece, but since that violates copyright laws I only previewed it and provided the link.

[the_fat_man]

"And why can’t we can quit pushing horses into the gate on television and whipping them to make them run? If the trainer can’t train his horse to go in the gate and the gate workers can’t put it in there without force, scratch him. Usually there is a reason a horse does not want to go in there. And usually the horses that want to run don’t have to be whipped. Beating a horse during a race and having it break down under the rider and lose its life is no way to build public support and attract new owners to this sport."

That gets it absolutely right.

In Australia the rule seems to be if they don't load after the second try they are scratched and the gates open immediately. No ridiculous delay like is prevalent here.

[Riot]

I was under the impression the early training affects the development of the racehorse's physique, enabling him to continue to run. Is that wrong?

No, that is correct. Listen to the replay of Steve's show from yesterday, with Dr. Bramlage, who briefly explains this.

In other horse sports - jumping, barrel racing, dressage, etc - horses are not brought into the more challenging physical part of their careers until they are much older (comparatively to racing)

People, especially horse people, then naturally have a tendency to transfer what applies and is true in other horse sports to racing.

There is a alot of valid veterinary orthopaedic research evidence, however - down to how much speed, how long, how many times a week - on what it takes to develop young race horses (2-year-olds) with the bone needed to support a racing career. It's all about "Wolff's Law".

You can't hothouse young developing bone by doing too little, too slow, or it will not remodel (during the time of life that it can) with the strength to stand up to the rigors of racing in the future.

If you do too much, you obviously break it down.

Spacing is important, as after the body is stressed to induce change, you have to allow the body time to accomplish the remodeling.

Too little is just as dangerous as too much. Certain speeds as a young horse are needed, at appropriate frequency. Slow galloping only on young horses leads to breakdowns due to weak bone in the future.

[Cannon Shell]

"It’s also true that American thoroughbred racing demands more of its animals at an earlier age than other countries’ systems do. The breakdowns that dismay the public invariably occur in the 2- and 3- and 4-year-old races, to animals that have for the most part been in training since they were 18 months old. Barbaro was a 3-year-old running in the Preakness. Two fillies who broke down at Churchill Downs before Breeders’ Cup cameras a couple of years back were 4-year-old mares. A lot of these injuries occur because the bones are already weak from the stress of persistent training long before their skeletal structures were mature enough."

Jim Squires may have a fine record as a breeder but he like so many others in the industry pass along untruths as facts.

The first sentence "American racing demands more of its animals at an earlier age than other countries" is fiction. European 2 year olds are on average campaigned much harder than our 2 year olds, running with more frequency and at earlier age. Is he suggesting that Barbaro and the fillies at the Breeders Cup who were 4 are too young to be racing? The theory that the horses skeletal system was weak from early training is disputed by every study ever done. Should human athletes not compete or train until they are into thier 20's and fully mature?

[hockey2315]

I'm pretty sure Fleet Indian was 5 or 6. . .