There’s very little I didn’t already know about the horse racing industry. In high school, I had a boyfriend whose family bred, raised, trained and raced horses, so I spent enough time hanging around to pick up on almost everything that goes on behind the scenes. His family were good and decent people, but hanging around the track you tend to learn about the large number of not so good and decent people who operate there, and that’s saying something considering my opinion of the “good” people. My opinion of horse racing, a “sport” where recent figures indicate that 75% of the horses “born to run” end up going to slaughter, and where equine death from breakdowns and injuries caused by centuries of overbreeding combined with “requests” for blistering speed is considered more or less normal, is clearly not high, but today I learned it’s even more fucked than I ever realized.
The Jockey Club, which is the official governing body of Thoroughbred racing (the kind you see in the Kentucky Derby) does not allow embryo transfer or artificial insemination of horses. In order to have a baby every year, a mare must be re-bred directly after foaling, which means that she must be shipped to the stallion for breeding directly after having her own baby. It’s a process that usually takes three to four weeks in whole, and the foal is too delicate (and valuable!) to travel with his mother. Plus, if she nurses her own foal, she’s not going to come back into heat and thus cannot conceive. Since her whole purpose is to give the breeder potentially valuable offspring, she must be rebred, and since she cannot nurse her own foal and fulfill her “purpose”, a “nurse mare” is brought in.
In order to give milk, female animals generally need to be pregnant and have given birth (the oxytocin secreted during birth allows lactation to begin). In the “nurse mare” industry, like the dairy industry, the newborn foals become the byproducts of milk production. The nurse mares are generally horses of “lower quality” who are otherwise healthy and good milk producers. They are bred to inexpensive stallions for the sole purpose of being able to provide milk to the potential racehorse foals. But wait, you ask… what about their own foals? If you’re unfamiliar with horses, you might think she, like a human wetnurse, gets to nurse both her baby and the other mare’s baby. That doesn’t seem so bad, you might think. Not bad enough to provoke yet another horse “sport” related rant at least. However, if you are familiar with horses, you know that mares rarely produce enough milk to support two foals (one reason why twins are such a problem) and that you’d have to give the mare a substantial amount more feed and that the whole process would require extra attention, extra money. Since the point is to make the “valuable” foal grow up strong and healthy, and the extra foal has no “value”, there’s no chance that the mare’s real baby will get a share of her milk anyway, so what then?
Traditionally, these foals are killed.
That’s right. Like dairy calves, these sentient “byproducts” are killed because they’re not worth keeping alive. It’s not that you couldn’t. You could (and rescues do) keep them alive on formula. However, on large farms, there tend to be a large number and these farms are concerned not with life, but with their bottom line. It is time consuming and not cheap, per say, to do. So they kill them. Why? On the off chance that the foal that their mother nurses will fetch money at auction or win on the track or become a superstar stud (25% chance he will, 75% chance he’ll go to slaughter too). Because their mothers’ are more valuable pregnant than being able to properly bond with their children.
These babies are killed because they have been judged based solely on their bloodlines, who their parents are, and found worthless based on some stupid human standard. These horses could be your horse, your best friend, could be Black Beauty, Seabiscuit, could be MY HORSE. It doesn’t matter what horse they could be, only that they are no different from the racehorse foal who replaces where it matters - they are sentient, they are subjects of a life, and they deserve to have that life.
Out in the world, there are rescues that take in these “orphan” foals and raise them, then adopt them out. The race barns make these rescues purchase the foals for between $200 and $400 - foals they were simply going to kill anyway. Many farms refuse to even allow the rescue to become involved because they don’t want the world to know what they do, because they believe that people who love horses, love racing, that the world would be outraged.
Not every breeding operation has a hand in this, I understand. Whether this is because not all operations can afford to, or because some people are genuinely appalled, I don’t know. I’m inclined to hope for the latter. If they are as disgusted by this as I am, I hope they would take a good hard look at why they’re involved in an industry where this is just business as usual.
What is equally appalling is that other “horse people”, with no real stake in racing, are also fairly untroubled by this. In a horse chat last night, this was explained to an uninitiated person, who was understandably shocked. She suggested that there should be some kind of investigation, that we should let people know, that this just might be abusive, that maybe we should try to put a stop to it. The response of the other “horse people” in the chat?
“How do you propose “someone” keep track of what somebody else does with their horses?”
Gee whiz, I dunno. Maybe that’s why we have law enforcement agencies devoted to exactly that. Of course, since some of the foals are killed via euthanasia (some are sent to slaughter for meat which is a delicacy in Europe) I guess that doesn’t currently qualify, but it’s not out of the realm of possibility. Then again, when you feel like this:
Euthanizing your animal at any point you feel like it is your right.
I guess it doesn’t matter. A quick note. The word euthanasia is used improperly here. Euthanasia is the painless killing of an individual who is suffering from an incurable (read: fatal) and painful condition. This? This is just plain killing. Euthanasia gives it the flavor of acceptability, but is not an accurate description even if it is done via lethal injection.
When the girl who objected to this practice left the chat, the others commented that she “got all bent out of shape” about it and seemed confused as to why. My question is, why didn’t they? I have long said that the concept love as applied to horses (and non-human animals in general) is a misnomer. I’m not suggesting that people don’t form sentimental attachments to these non-human animals, and that in some cases the bonds aren’t on par with the bonds formed to human companions. I am suggesting that in a majority of cases, the bonds are closer to the way in which I love my car, or my favorite shirt. This is particularly obvious in the case of horses, since most “horse lovers” buy and sell the animals they love without second thought if the horse should no longer suit their purpose at any given time. It becomes even more obvious in the case of what should be clearly abusive practices like the above. Claiming to be a “horse lover” while simultaneously saying that to breed a mare, take her baby hours after birth and kill the baby for the sake of extra profit is at all appropriate, okay, or anything less than atrocious is an odd juxtaposition at best. If that’s how you display love, please, stay far away from me. And try not to have children.
Henry, rescued from a similar situation in 2007.
I don’t want anyone out there to think I don’t understand what you love about horse racing, or that I am absolved of viewing horses in the way I just spoke about. Five years ago, I was seriously considering selling Rivet because he just wasn’t right for what I thought I wanted to do. I didn’t, and I am forever thankful for that because I’ve come to realize I do love him in a way that makes him as priceless as Alex. When I used to go to the track and watch the horses, all I saw was the incredible beauty and power of the horses roaring down the backstretch. There is nothing wrong with finding something thrilling about that (I still get chills down my spine sometimes), but next time you watch a race, try thinking about all the pain and suffering that go on behind the scenes. Instead of seeing power and glory, see the confusion of the newborn foal removed from his mom, see the terror and utter exhaustion of the horse trucked to slaughter, see the excruciating pain of Eight Belles as she broke both legs on the track. See that, and see if you still love it.
My girlfriend is training to be a jockey, so I’ve seen quite my fair share of horse racing lately. I certainly agree that there are lots of terrible things going on behind the scenes.
What I DON’T agree with, however, is that horse racing is a bad thing, in itself.
There are ways to race horses ethically. Horses do love to run, and it’s clear that these horses enjoy their sport. They love it. Yes, they can break legs, but it seems to me they have a better chance racing than they would in the wild.
There needs to be some reform. We shouldn’t race horses who we know are MORE likely to break their legs (e.g. 2-year-olds), and we shouldn’t be shipping away our “useless” horses to the slaughter (or worse). There are surely many other things that we shouldn’t do. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t race horses… it just means that we should push for reform.
With that said, I definitely see where you are coming from. I just wish more people gave a damn.
It is interesting to discuss an ethical horse racing industry, because we premise the idea on the concept that animals are indeed property and ours to do what we wish with. If the thing we choose to do benefits them, so be it, but if not, well, it’s not like they’d do any better on their own, right?
I think if you remove the premise that it’s our right to own them, you cannot have ethical animal “sports”. Therefore to claim that these sports can be ethical, we need to defend that claim. Can you do that? I cannot.
The claim that they are better off racing than in the wild seems false to me. Would certain groups of people be technically “better off” if we placed them in captivity in return for all the food they needed and an agreement not to treat them harshly? I think that your intuitive response is no, but why? They’d be better off! They’d have a better chance! Let us not forget also that there is a 75% slaughter rate for horses “born to run”. The mortality rate for America’s wild horses is clearly less than that, as the birth rate is estimated to be around 20% and according to the BLM we’re seeing herd size increases, not decreases. There is no evidence at all to suggest that horses are more or less likely to break a leg on the range, but that’s not even close to the point. I never suggested that we turn all race horses out to be “wild”, only that we cease to race them for money.
The truth is that as long as horse racing is an industry, i.e. a way to make money, then the horses will always always always loose out. As long as it is okay to use them as a way to make money, their interests will not be taken into account because they don’t technically have interests. I understand that horses love to run. My horse loves to run. However, removing the institution of horse racing from our world won’t stop them from running
You do not need institutionalized horse racing to allow horses to run, or even to race. We don’t race horses because they love to run, we race them because we want to make money off them.
Thanks for commenting. I’d like to hear your thoughts.
There are a lot of abuses in horse racing to be sure, but I would like to know the source of 75% slaughter rate . . .
I’ve met so many thoroughbreds that were at least “tried” at the track, but were retrained for pleasure, polo, hunter, dressage, etc.
that just seems a crazy high number . . is it real or sensationalized?
That particular number comes from Best Friends, and a similar statistic can be found at HSUS. That number probably has a margin of error of +/- 10. It’s almost impossible to get a full read on the real number, for reasons you can probably imagine. The total number of horses sent to slaughter per year is about 100,000, by the way - seems huge, huh? Keep in mind this statistic is total racing, not just Thoroughbred racing (TB, QH, Arabian, Standardbred etc.).
I too know many horses who have been taken from the track and “rehabbed” into other disciplines, including my first horse, Boomer, and at first I was astonished at the rates. It seems like a majority of eventers are OTTBs, and they are gaining popularity in the Hunter/Jumper ring too, so you see them everywhere, but think about how few people actually compete in these ’sports’, and then think about how many horses the race industry churns out each year. If you look at organizations like CANTER, there are always more ex-racehorses in need of homes than there are people willing to take them.
thank you so much for this information. it is now confirmed to me that horse racing is indeed a cruel sport.
Interesting article. Were did you got all the information from.
Which information are you referring to? The statistics on slaughter rates are cited in an above comment. The information on the “nurse mare” industry comes from a variety of sources. Much of it comes from the rescue groups that purchase the foals to prevent them from being sent to slaughter. These groups maintain a remarkably even tone in presenting the facts - something they must do in order to maintain relationships with the breeding farms so that they can continue to be “permitted” to rescue the foals. It also comes directly from friends and contacts within the Thoroughbred racing industry, as well as the Arabian breeding/showing industry. There was actually an article in Bloodhorse online last week about nurse mares, which did not include information on the prevalence or what happens to the foals, but did make the point that a) it is a common practice and b) they are switching to lighter breeds of horse as opposed to the traditional draft horses.