Enemies Begone!
Hello, mystery fans, and welcome back to another season of Horse Mysteries, the podcast that is what is says it is!
This episode:
When a star racehorse suddenly drops dead, the net of suspicion is cast far and wide. Still, it will take almost a hundred years to figure out what actually happened – and who was responsible.
All that and another fun segment of Horse Bits too as Dave tests Lezah’s extensive horse knowledge with impromptu anatomy questions!
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Good to hear you back for another season of Horse Mysteries! After listening to the story of Phar Lap and hearing about those horse deaths at this year’s Kentucky Derby week, I wonder why the sport is allowed to continue when there is still so much abuse. Is there an attitude of “it’s just a few bad apples” or “it’s just the cost of doing business”? I tried to find a stat for how many track deaths there are. One recent U.S. estimate was 1.25 deaths for every 1000 starts. If the Vancouver Marathon had the same rate of mortality for its runners, then we’d see 25 competitors perish every year. It would be sad if as many underperforming and aging marathoners as race horses were slaughtered rather than allowed to live out their days peacefully in retirement homes!
You raise a very valid point. I think the issue is multi-faceted – to begin with, horse-racing predates the release of ‘Bambi’ and the rise of horses as companions/pleasure animals, and so there is a view in the racehorse community in particular of horses as chattel rather than of them being sentient beings/our friends/pets.
When I read about what happened to the horses that served in WW1 I’m always horrified, and the track comes a close second to that. I read some stats that the average life expectancy for a thoroughbred gelding is 3. Mares and stallions can retire to the breeding shed, but there’s not much in the way of a second career for a lame tb gelding, sadly.
And what we’re reading about now, all the high profile breakdowns on the track – that’s just the tip of the iceberg, as so many are culled before they even get a chance to race. They don’t stand up/go lame, they’re not fast enough, etc. – many of these are put on trucks and head south to Mexico for the horse meat industry.
Even Ferdinand, who won the Kentucky Derby, making his owners millions, suffered that fate. It’s a heartless business, indeed.
Then you get the people who abuse pharmaceuticals to get that little bit more out of the horses, leading to catastrophic breakdowns. You’d think, 100 years past the time of Phar Lap, with our much greater medical knowledge, better diagnostics and more advanced medical treatments that we’d have the technology to create healthier horses but sadly that is not the case – and we see this phenomena in the horse show world, as well.
Then there are running surfaces that are at issue: in North America, our horses get something called bucked shins (like shin splints in human runners) that are the direct result of running on the harder dirt tracks we have in North America. I’ve read that bucked shins are almost unheard of in other countries that run horses, mainly because most places use turf tracks which are more forgiving.
Santa Anita in particular has had some high profile issues with breakdowns recently and a lot of the focus has been on the track surface, which has been extensively reworked but with much less success than they had hoped.
In the sport of three-day eventing, there has been a very high rate of not just horse deaths but also rider deaths – for a while eventing was considered the most dangerous sport in the horse based on human fatalities, and it’s still right up there in the top five/ten.
There was a very good study done that attributed the high death rate of participants purely to attitude – to paraphrase, the three day eventing sport comes out of the military, which of course is associated with a tacitly accepted rate of attrition, and concurrently there’s long been a ‘get back on that horse’ attitude to riding (a common phrase has been, when someone falls off: ‘Horse or hospital’ – the implication being that if you’re not badly enough hurt than you need to go to the hospital, then you need to get back on that horse – but while that goes very much against all the concussion protocol that we have now, it’s still a very pervasive attitude with many who rode in the past, and it continues to be inflicted upon the riders of today).
Anyway, this study pointed out that in horse sports, we do have a high level of awareness of risk, but a low level of outrage about the risk, and as such, the risk is accepted as the cost of doing business, essentially.
I could go on, but I won’t. Thank you for raising a great point.
sorry, I had intended to write the most dangerous sport in the world (not in the horse)