by: Fiona Malcarney
Racing horses has been a popular pastime for decades, stadiums full of fans cheering for the underdog, or even the horse who has already won the Belmont and the Preakness. Everyone is excited, the atmosphere is brilliant, and the horses are anxiously waiting for the gate to open, but the world has changed since racing first began. Drugs are now used to improve a horse’s stamina, speed and the amount of pain they are in.
I strongly believe that drugging racehorses are completely wrong and immoral. The use of drugs in racing started as something simple, used conservatively and in moderation, just as something to relieve the pain after training. It was kind, humane, but it isn’t anymore. The current use of drugs in racing is to win, to win for fame, for money, for the lifestyle. Everyone just wants to win.
The drugs used in racing are destroying a once beautiful breed, these horses are shattering their legs, and then keep running another 50 yards. When racing was honest and horses weren’t just dollar signs, drugs were used as painkillers and the horses weren’t raced every day or every other day like they are now. “Bute wasn’t enough. No drug is. Legal Bute engendered a drug culture.” (Gustafson)
These drugs are tearing horses apart, and I mean that in the most literal way. Their legs are being ravaged and a broken leg is a dead horse.
The reason leg injuries are so common is simple, and terrifying at the same time. The drugs create fragile bone structure, the use of drugs allows horses to be raced more than they can. When they can’t feel that they are tired or aching they are willing to run faster, for longer and more often.
When you combine overwork and a 1,000 pond animal on fragile legs that aren’t even fully grown, you get a case like Eight Belles.
Eight Belles was a racehorse who died behind a green screen on a racetrack after breaking both of her front ankles. The drugs the trainers used on her were “therapeutic” and “for the aching in her legs.” Now I am a rider, and I am positive the best way to deal with lameness is rest. Not drugs. Especially not drugs. Not bute. No milkshakes. No anabolic steroids. Rest and a nice pasture. The problem is that these horses are seen as money and it is cheaper to euthanize a horse after running it into its grave, than giving it the time to rest and recover to be able to perform its best on race day.
In order to solve this outbreak of drugs, they would have to be banned completely. The standing rule, “Clean on race day” has caused so many horses to be drugged into a grave in the loose dirt that we know as a racetrack. As our country takes a hit from the dependence of its human population on opioids, our horses take a hit as their human caretakers push the same dependence onto them. There is no way around it, these drugs can’t be used in training, they can’t be used at all.
This was written not just to inform you. It was written for the OTTB that I jump, and even though he is crazy there is no other horse I would rather jump a grid with than that crazy chestnut. My only hope is that maybe next time you don’t place that bet on that horse because you know even if that horse wins the race, it loses in the end. If just one person decides that these horses matter and that the abuse of these drugs “for the horses’ sake” is a load of crap, then I have done my job. As long as one person realizes that this is abuse and should be considered as such under the law, I have done my job.