Is thoroughbred racing cruel?
While I can’t justify any past abuse of Amir, I think the Kentucky Derby thoroughbreds are much less likely to be abused. Granted, they’ll probably still be jumpy—but this is more from years of breeding fast horses than any sort of abuse. It is important for a domesticated animal to have a job—and in many cases that includes running. If a horse does not like running, it won’t be a very good race horse and a responsible trainer should realize that.Mostly, they are very well taken care of—and sometimes they die doing what they love. Keeping them away from their purpose may be more cruel than letting them do what they do.Of course, there are other places to find horrible abuse in the horse industry. I would start with the horse slaughter industry. Next look at what they do to the Tennessee walking horses to get them to step as high as they do.
Ok, #1) these horses do not LOVE racing/running. I cannot stress this enough. They were TRAINED to do it. The horse I ride, Amir, was raced for 10 years, and now getting him to calm down and not run like crazy when hes under saddle is the hardest thing in the world because he’s scared out of his wits that I’m going to beat the crap out of him if he doesn’t. Not to mention the other phobias he has because of how roughly he was handled. He won’t be touched on his ears, he hates to be saddled, and god forbid you ask him to relax and walk. I know the general public doesn’t realize any of this because they don’t interact with the horses, but PLEASE, don’t labor under the misconception that this is what the horse wants to do: it’s not. #2) I agree with you on the TW horse cruelty. It’s slowly being abolished, but not nearly fast enough. Sigh.
There are stories of some of the great race horses losing a hard fought race and never racing the same way again, almost as if their spirits were broken.
(Dan’s wife in). Not every race horse on the track has suffered abuse. I’ve known off-track TB’s (and paints, and standardbreds, and QH’s…) who turned quite quickly into well adjusted horses for a variety of civillian uses. Off-track critters are often prized precisely because after seeing all the hubub of the racetrack, little else can phase them. (The fact that they’re broken to saddle or harness at all means they have more going for them than all too many of the equine population…) One Standardbred so obviously loved his second job (being fussed over by children and carrying disabled riders around) that it’s hard to imagine he ever loved racing - but not because of any obvious trauma!
Some people want to tell you that all horses love to do is eat and sleep. Not so. (Well, it is so for some horses. But Dan’s right, they probably don’t make good race horses.) Horses are also competitive. As horses begin their racing careers, many trainers struggle with “teaching them to rate” - the rider and the trainer wish that they could get less effort from the horse in the early part of the race, but his competitive spirit won’t let him hang back off the leaders or give less than his best once on the lead. It may not look like it to those of us watching from the ground, but racing is a game of strategy, and that’s not a game that can be well played as an animal bolts in terror.
Add to this competitiveness a final thought: horses are eager to please, and, yes, they are able to find joy in exertion and speed. I’m thinking especially of one of my best horse-friends, a rangy quarter horse gelding who was a field hunter for sixteen years. He belonged to the whipper in - pack of foxhounds tumbling around his legs, duty to stay close to the dogs as they trailed the fox, no time to go around the big fences to the gates or coops - over or through any obstacle, gallop as fast as need be over all kinds of ungodly terrain. More than ten years later, enjoying the relative ease of life as a therapeutic riding mount, on those weekend mornings when we would hear the pack singing in the hills, he’d raise his head to track them and give the excited nicker he usually reserved for the approach of dinner or for begging me to chew an apple for him, and he’d paw at his stall as if he’d join the hunt, thirty-three years old, arthritic shoulder and all.
Horses (if they are not abused as Amir obviously was) can love their jobs, even the dangerous and difficult ones.