What a beautiful animal. What a crying shame.

I spoke to Kay-who’s-last-name-I-never-remember (she and her partner write lots of SF television) and she knew tons about Eight Belles breeding. Apparently, her sire was fast, but injured. So now he’s siring big, fast babies with a terrible record for breaking down.

Don’t get me started on Big Brown, who has serious hoof-lameness issues. That’s why he was only raced three times before the Derby. Now he’s in padded shoes (which I’ve put on Ace to great success, but I don’t expect my boy to be pushing 5000 pounds a square inch on his feet at any point) but I’m just waiting to hear about how his feet are doing after that race. He was impressive, but his owners are a syndicate who are enticing people in as an “investment.” I think the FTC or whoever is in charge of things like that should be ashamed to let that kind of scheme exist. There is the horse as dollar sign to the nth degree. I keep thinking “if you want to earn a small fortune in the horse industry, start with a large fortune.”

Eight Belles’ trainer is now saying that a tox screen will be part of the autopsy to prove she wasn’t on steroids before running.

In Europe, they don’t race horses until they are 4 or 5. Here, these babies start running at 2 because of the January 1 birthday convention. Dumb and dumberer.

The one trainer I’ve met a couple of times at Santa Anita (a college friend and fellow competitive bull rider with Ron Weschler when the both went to Pierce and a lawyer) l goes to Europe to buy experienced horses to run in handicaps out here. They last longer and are less likely to break down (he trains the horses owned by David Milch–talk about an addictive personality.) He doesn’t like the way babies are raced here at all.

Fred Astair’s widow was a jockey when he met her. I think she was the first successful female jockey. I have watched at least one ride in the Kentucky Derby. I don’t want to go that fast and there are no jockeys who don’t have lots of broken bones. Just ask Gary Stevens, who played George Woolf in “Seabiscuit.” I think his last major accident was after he appeared in the film.

To add injury to insult, here in California, the legislature was recently considering a proposal to mandate sterilization of all domestic animals, with only licensed breeders being allowed to have fertile animals. Now, that sounds like a decent, humane proposal—I personally loathe people who blithely let their pets breed and then dump the offspring to become feral when they can’t find homes for them. But on the other hand, it says that if you want to have a pet, you must give money to a breeder, at breeders’ prices, and accept the qualities that breeders are willing to produce. Carol and I have had three cats since we began cohabiting, none of which has had any breeding whatever, and they have given us a lot of affection and amusement, as well as being generally healthy, and the first two were both adopted off the street; we have no interest in having a show cat. So I’m inclined to view this measure cynically as an idealistic-sounding way to enrich pet breeders—a classic little bit of what economists call “rent-seeking.”

I’ve heard it said, but can’t personally confirm, that European breeders have more balanced standards than American.