Kentucky Derby winner Medina Spirit’s death is shocking in just one regard: we never learn our lesson.
It’s long past time for this so-called sport to disappear. Horse racing is cruel, mercenary, abusive and lethal. “Medina Spirit’s [death] is the biggest . . . in horse racing currently,” Patrick Battuello, founder and president of Horseracing Wrongs, tells the Post. “But pubescent horses collapsing and dying — this is just business as usual.”
Medina Spirit was only three years old, equivalent to nine in human years.
“Horses are fully mature at age six,” Battuello says. “The bones in their neck and spine are the last to finish. But at 18 months old, they are put into intense training, then launched at two, when they still have their baby teeth.”
In testifying before the New York State Senate in 2019, equine veterinarian Dr. Kraig Kulikowski said, “The racetrack healthcare environment is one of lawlessness on multiple levels . . . the question is never, ‘What is the right thing to do?’ but ‘What can we get away with?’ ”
He spoke of trainers with zero medical experience overruling racetrack veterinarians in all matters of equine health care — and that’s industry standard. Battuello’s research, informed by Freedom of Information requests, has found that over 2,000 racehorses die every year, more than six per day.
The Horseracing Integrity and Safety Act, signed into federal law last year, is little more than window dressing for a multibillion industry where death has become normalized, he says.
“The HRI is almost entirely focused on drugs,” Battuello says. “While that might sound good to the average person, that is not the problem. The reason these horses are breaking down and dying is the constant grinding of these immature bodies.”
Think about the frequency of death, how often racehorses collapse on the track, only to be hauled off and euthanized or put down on the track itself — yet races continue, the Winner’s Circle celebrates, and the media swiftly casts aside the carnage.
Can you imagine any sport in which human athletes routinely died on the field, in competition, and we simply removed the bodies and kept going?
Or one in which aged-out players weren’t retired but sent to the slaughterhouse, as about 13,000 thoroughbreds are annually?
Three years ago, after multiple deaths at California’s Santa Anita racetrack, I wrote a column wondering where our humanity has gone — the human-equine bond being second in strength and sacredness only to the human-canine one.
Horses have built civilizations and defended empires. They have fought and died in wars with us. Perhaps no other animal is as emblematic of the American DNA as the horse — not the bald eagle, not the wild turkey or the bison, but the animal responsible for westward expansion. Horses, like dogs, have evolved for human companionship and, yes, protection.
They are social creatures.
Yet we allow these horses to be pushed beyond their biological limits, to be drugged, whipped, kept corralled in tiny 12-by-12 stalls for 23 hours a day when they’re not spending 30 or so minutes in training they’re too young to handle.
No doubt about it: we are sanctioning torture.
“A 12-by-12 stall for a thousand-pound horse,” Dr. Kulikowski testified, “is equivalent to a four foot-by-four foot closet for a one hundred pound child.”
What kind of society would allow that, let alone venerate it?
As equine vet Dr. Kate Papp told “Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel” in 2019, trainers often demand that horses with broken legs be drugged up to race, and there’s no shortage of unethical vets who will take that money.
Papp spoke of a horse she found standing in its stall, on three legs, the fourth dangling. “Just the look in his eyes said, ‘Please, somebody, help me,’ ” she said.
The circus is dead. Dogfighting is almost completely eradicated. What will it take for us to save the racehorse?
