Quote:
Originally Posted by Suff
Santa Anita, as with all tracks faced with kill-spikes (see Saratoga 2017), is in full damage-control mode. Floating various possible culprits – the weather?, the track surface? – SA and the CHRB are desperately trying to convince the masses that no stone will be left unturned in the pursuit of “equine safety.” Please. The truth, for those who truly want to know, is as plain as the nose on your face: Horseracing kills horses as a matter of course. Always has. Always will.
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The logic at the end of that always bothers me because without horse racing those horses literally would not exist. They were bred to race.
But with that said, it's high time racing does a better job. It needs to protect its horses by making racetracks safer at any cost. It's not going to cut it to have repeated outbreaks of fatal injuries as a by-product of racing, not in 2019.
Racing in general also needs to do a better job of publicizing the things it already does for horses now to be sure they don't end up slaughtered and that they aren't taken for granted. As Suff said earlier, that can be done through social media, the same way the anti-horse racing forces work it. I don't know how much "good news" messages will fight through the negativity, but they need to get out there.
