Equine safety a top priority
Breakdowns a reminder racing can always do better
A few days ago, I got a message from a Twitter follower that I didn’t know was a racing fan. She said that she’d always been a racing fan and that her sister owns horses, and she’d come up from Brooklyn to Saratoga for the races.
She was here on a day on which one of Saratoga’s eight racing fatalities took place, and, understandably, it shook her, profoundly, so much so that she’s not sure that she can watch racing any longer. She was especially distressed by the reaction of the people around her, who seemed more concerned about their wagers than about the horse.
Such sentiments are not uncommon this summer, when the equine deaths currently sit at 17, more than last year, which itself was unusually high. Animal welfare protestors congregate at the track’s entrance; two days ago, I saw a man on a bicycle towing a wagon and placard protesting the deaths.
Though the fatality rate has earned a lot of ink this summer, particularly in local publication, racing’s authorities had been quiet. That has changed, with a press release yesterday and two programs focusing on equine injury and safe retirement.
Last week, the New York Thoroughbred Horsemen’s Association (NYTHA) presented a continuing education program for trainers in which Dr. Patty Hogan discussed when to retire a racehorse to give it the best of chance of being sound enough for a second career. Part of that, of course, is preventing injury during horses’ careers.
Today, the New York State Gaming Commission is offering another continuing education opportunity for trainers, this one focusing on equine fatalities. The four-hour program will focus on four topics: the findings of the New York State Thoroughbred post-mortem examination program; using risk and protective factors to prevent equine injury; using fetlock computed tomography (CT) scans to assess sesamoid bone fractures; and challenges specific to the Saratoga meet. The presenters will be Dr. Scott Palmer, New York’s equine medical director; and Drs. Heidi Reesnick and Erin Cresswell from Cornell University. The presentation isn’t open to the public, but it will be recorded and available online at a later date.
The Gaming Commission last year enacted a rule that requires trainers to participate in four hours of continuing education each year in order to remain licensed, a requirement supported by NYTHA.
And yesterday, the Gaming Commission, NYTHA, and the New York Racing Association (NYRA) issued a joint press release regarding equine fatalities, reviewing measures that have been taken in the past to reduce injury and announcing several new ones, including increasing the presence of regulatory veterinarians during training hours and monitoring horses considered to be at increased risk of injury by using The Jockey Club’s In-Compass software, which provides a database with information about horses from a number of racetracks.
The release also included the fatality rate at NYRA tracks (Belmont, Aqueduct, and Saratoga) over the last five years. The fatality rate was 2.2 per thousand starts in 2012, dropping to 1.09 per thousand starts in 2015. In each of the last four years, NYRA’s fatality rate has been lower than the national average.
In 2014, Saratoga saw 14 equine deaths from racing and training, a rate of 1.83 per thousand starts. That number was significant enough that the Gaming Commission undertook a study of those deaths, releasing it in November 2015. A similar study of last summer’s 16 fatalities was also undertaken but has yet to be released. It seems likely that this year’s alarming rate of fatality will require an additional investigation.
I bring up measures like this when people like that woman on Twitter tell me that they can’t bear to watch racing any longer. Even as I welcome additional procedures to help ensure equine and jockey safety, I can’t help feel like an apologist at times, too. We can’t explain away or rationalize the death of a horse, and not many people I know — within the industry and outside it — want to.
So when I responded to her, I said the thing that I know to be true, for myself and a lot of other people: that an equine death is horrifying to witness, and that we never get over it, or get past it. And that’s a good thing, because it means that we’ll have to keep doing better, for the horses.