Quote:
Originally Posted by zico20
Horses today take a long time to recover, which just goes to prove many people's point that today's horses are inferior to the ones of the past.
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I don't think this is true, although I realize I can't prove it.
I think the economic incentives created by the explosion of profits in the breeding industry clearly effect how horses are trained. It's almost a Marxist point, but structures matter- if you create incentives for top horses to not run very much and get to the breeding shed as quickly as possible, the training methodologies will be affected by those incentives.
The easiest way to see this is to compare what happens to Flightline with what happens to claimers, where the incentives run the other way. There are no claimers like Flightline. You have a claimer, he's sound, you run him, because that's the way you pay the feed and training bills and potentially make money. Sometimes you run them every couple of weeks.
If it were really true that "horses today take a long time to recover", you'd see claimers campaigned like stakes horses, with a start every 8 weeks or so. But you don't see that, because there hasn't been any magical change in the horses, just the incentives.
