Just under two year’s after the Barbaro story, another promising horse dies doing her job.
This seemed like too much, so I did some searching and found out a number of things:
“Because horse racing lacks a national governing body, death and injury data on a broader scale is notoriously scant, although studies estimate that horses suffer lethal breakdowns an average of 1.5 times in every 1,000 starts.” - Brian Hiro, North County Times, Escondido CA.
“Last year, 57,495 races were run in the United States and Canada for a total of 469,644 starts, according to statistics compiled by the Jockey Club. Using Nunamaker’s figure, that means about 704 horses died while racing in 2005 in the United States and Canada, about 1.93 fatalities per day.” - AP June 10, 2006
And the danger isn’t only to the fragile, beautiful thoroughbreds. Jockeys place themselves in serious danger compared to other sports:
“There are many dangers in horse racing for both horse and jockey: a horse can stumble and fall, or fall when jumping an obstacle, exposing both jockey and horse to the danger of being trampled and injured.
In 1984, R.J. McCunney and P.K. Russo published a study entitled Brain Injuries in Boxing. The study demonstrated that the U.S. sport with the highest number of deaths per 100,000 participants was horse racing:
Fatality rates per 100,000 participants
- Horse racing: 128
- Sky diving: 123
- Hang gliding: 56
- Mountaineering: 51
- Scuba Diving: 11
- Motorcycle racing: 7
- College Football: 3
- Boxing: 1.3
-from Wikipedia “Horse Racing
Having said and shown that, horses are just fragile critters. Nearly a ton of strong, handsome meat on four small, relatively delicate wrists makes for an accident waiting to happen when thrown in with twenty high-strung, equally athletic, type-A racers from a gene pool European monarchs would envy.
Throw in Jacobin jockeys and it’s a bit of a surprise so many survive.
Finally, here is a link to a rant-blog with discussion that presents arguments about what is happening with racing:
http://fuglyhorseoftheday.blogspot.com/2008/05/another-one-bites-dust.html
Tags: derby, horse racing, sports
May 7, 2008 at 2:49 am
Was listening to talk radio yesterday (The Shnitt Show) and he had a caller who said that the US is the only country that allows medication on race day. Additionally he talked about how years of breeding for speed (not to be confused with sport-porking) has caused horses’ ankles to be fragile. That lead to a comparison of Eight Belles’ ankles with Hillary’s.