By Kathy Guillermo
When I wrote this in June, 30 horses had already died at the Santa Anita Park horseracing track in Los Angeles just since December.
If you’ve ever seen a horse break a leg and go down on a racetrack, the shocking scene will play over and over again in your mind like a horror film. Sometimes the desperate animal, confused and in agony, will get up and try to run, the mangled limb dangling. This unimaginable tragedy is why vehicles follow behind Thoroughbreds in many races, and when a horse goes down, huge fabric screens are pulled from the truck and quickly erected. Witnesses with cell phones are not tolerated.
But Santa Anita is not an outlier. What happened at this track is a microcosm of what’s happening in racing nationally: broken bones, death and public outrage. California isn’t the only place where horses are dying. Their bodies litter tracks in New York, Kentucky, Florida, Texas and many other states. At least 12 horses have died on Maryland tracks this year, and 15 at Belmont Park and Aqueduct racetracks in New York. While several factors may contribute to a fractured leg, evidence from thousands of necropsies of Thoroughbreds in California overwhelmingly shows that most horses who break legs have a pre-existing injury at the site of the break. In other words, horses are being forced to train and race when they should be recuperating. These horses often don’t appear sore because they’re given a constant cocktail of medications that mask injury and pain. Santa Anita officials are dealing with this by taking unprecedented steps to prevent further carnage. They have enacted rules, which PETA has long advocated, to protect horses, including banning more than a dozen drugs that mask injury yet were routinely administered.
State officials have voted to ban whips—the most visible form of abuse—and to phase out the controversial diuretic Lasix, which is illegal outside the U.S. on race day but administered to nearly every horse in this country. These steps don’t go far enough, but they are the first serious reform in racing in a generation. While PETA ultimately opposes racing, we back rules that will prevent horses from suffering and dying, and we urge the entire racing industry to shut down until every track enacts them.
Furthermore, synthetic surfaces, which save lives, should replace dirt tracts, sophisticated CT scan equipment should be installed at every track, and trainers with multiple violations should be permanently banned.
Broken bones should never have become business as usual. But the more than two dozen horses who die on tracks every single week in the U.S. have been sold out by an industry that prioritizes speed and winning over decent care.
The public must focus its outrage on something meaningful: Never gamble on horses’ lives.
