Pointless Tragedy
Well, greed, stupidity and an unwillingness to admit to a problem has killed another beautiful animal. Thank god, I didn’t actually watch the Derby on Saturday. Instead I was happily watching IRON MAN (more about that in another post). It wasn’t until Sunday morning that I heard the news about Eight Bells, and the ended up seeing her collapse on Monday morning. I had been trying to avoid it, but they snuck it in on me.
Okay, time for a rant. The problem is that the thoroughbred is a hideously in-bred creature who can no longer withstand the task for which they have been created. They have gone the way of the German Shepherd. The stud book was pretty much fixed back in the 18th century after the admixture of Arabian blood into the English and Irish sport horses. What is desperately needed is an infusion of new blood into the line. They need to pick some terrifically fast Arab stallion from Dubai or Saudi Arabia, and pick some superb Olympic jumper (a German or Dutch sporthorse stallion), and allow them to be bred to thoroughbred mares.
There are farms where a great racing stallion is being bred back to his granddaughters. It’s never a good thing, and certainly not when you’ve been doing it for two centuries.
Then there is the issue of American greed. These horses are broke and start running at two years of age, and are expected to run in world class races when they are barely three years old. This is like asking a seven year old human to run a marathon. These horses are babies. My Vento has just turn six, and Christine Traurig (who rode in the Olympics) calls him “the baby”. If we waited to run these horses until they were at least four years of age they would hold up better. It still wouldn’t undo the damage of generations of inbreeding, but it would help.
When I was a little girl I wanted to be a jockey. (Everyone told me I couldn’t because girls couldn’t be jockeys. That’s the subject for another rant, at another time.) I watched racing, I got to breeze a racehorse, I loved it. Now I won’t watch a televised race or go to a track because I’m pretty sure that sometime during that day a horse is going to breakdown and have to be euthanized. It’s like I’m being stabbed every time I have to see that, and it brings back all the awful memories of the night Steppi died.
People need to start demanding change or this situation is just going to continue to get worse. I’m not a PETA nut, but this has become abuse.
May 6th, 2008 at 3:05 pm
All agreed. I had recorded the event because Len and I ran off to lunch and we got back just in time to see Big Brown and the announcement that he had won. It was moments before the tragedy, but I quickly turned back to the beginning of the broadcast to watch the build-up, even though I knew my pick, Eight Belles, did not win. If I had watched a few minutes longer before flipping back, I would have saved myself the grief.
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.
May 7th, 2008 at 7:03 am
That sort of degeneration happens with other domesticated animals, too. My understanding is that a lot of purebred dogs have predictable health breakdowns that result in their dying young; they may also have behavioral problems. People who think of showing animals focus on physical appearance over other qualities, and they’re prepared to pay higher prices, apparently—so breeders naturally emphasize appearance at the expense of health and behavior. Similar issues arise with other species, such as cats, but perhaps less intensively, because dogs have amazing genetic plasticity; still, cat breeders have produced the flat-faced Persian and the narrow-faced Siamese . . . I understand there’s actually a separate association for “apple-headed” Siamese, meaning Siamese with traditional cat-shaped heads.
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.
June 2nd, 2008 at 12:48 pm
You’re right, it was a pointless tragedy. In addition to the greed is a huge amount of ego. It makes me ill when I see so many beautiful creatures - horses, dogs, cats & more whose breeds have been ruined utterly by breeding to idealized standards and not taking into account long-term health. I’d rather have a healthy mixed breed than a papered anything here in the US.