The racing industry is silent about slaughtered thoroughbreds.How did a five-year-old racehorse named Princess Madeline end up in a feedlot on July 13, priced for slaughter? Ask a horse trainer, and they’ll probably shrug. More than 10,000 U.S. Thoroughbreds a year ship to slaughterhouses in Canada and Mexico, slightly more than the 7,567 yearlings sold at auction in 2010 to American, Japanese and Middle Eastern billionaires, among others.
These doomed Thoroughbreds are racing’s collateral damage—and that’s before you include the 750 who die on the track each year, an average of two fatal injuries per day according to the Jockey Club’s new equine injury database.For some reason, though, the media won’t talk about this spectacular pile up of dead horses. They’re too busy covering the fun and investment side of racing, like partnerships and syndicates and tax deductions for yearlings.
More than two dozen stories on racing have run in recent months on this web site and on nytimes.com, including nearly back-to-back articles in which two different billionaires shared the thrill of investing in racehorses and one auctioneer compared it to buying yachts. But 10,750 dead Thoroughbreds? No mention of them in the sport of kings.
The Thoroughbreds’ tragic, untold tales lead from racetracks across America to auctions vastly different than the scene at Keeneland and Fasig-Tipton that the media celebrates so blindly. This is where Amish farmers trade in their draft horses and other people buy and sell backyard ponies, quarter horses, Paints, Appaloosas, donkeys and discarded racehorses on the cheap.
The names read like fancy farms somewhere in bluegrass country: Winter, Sugarcreek, New Holland. Most consist of feedlots or kill pens into which large numbers of horses are systematically whipped and herded, their halters and identifying information replaced by hip numbers. Some go to homes and rescues; more than 100,000 a year go to kill buyers.
The U.S. shut down the last remaining slaughterhouses for horses in 2007, but still allows horses to be shipped over our borders to be slaughtered for affluent diners in the Netherlands, Belgium, France, Italy and Japan. And while new legislation seeking to ban that (S. 1176: the American Horse Slaughter Prevention Act of 2011) is presently in review, until it gets passed, U.S. horses travel 24 hours or more, without food, water or rest, in livestock trucks designed for cattle, to slaughter plants using slaughter methods also designed for cattle.
This is a disaster for horses, which could not be more different than cows. Horses are flight animals. It’s the reason they’re used for racing, fox hunting, polo, steeple chasing, Olympic dressage, jumping and barrel racing. It’s also what makes them useful for the military and police, as well as for plowing, logging and calf roping. We do not use Herefords and Holsteins for that.
The livestock trucks were not designed to accommodate horses’ longer necks and legs and higher center of gravity. Put a horse in a cattle car, and it can’t stand upright.The kill boxes and stunning methods, too, ignore horses’ slimmer bodies and longer heads as well as their instinct to flight. Cows aren’t built for speed. Herd one into a kill box and they don’t have room to move. They’ll basically stand still. This is documented in nearly every hidden video on horse slaughter now accessible online—and there are many.
Complicating matters, horse brains are located further back in their skulls, making them harder to knock unconscious even when a clean shot is delivered. Many regain consciousness within 30 seconds. They do this to all the horses—even foals, which is illegal. Compared to the slaughter of cattle, horse slaughter is relatively unregulated, and even the attendant laws to protect humans are routinely ignored. I’m talking specifically about those banning the use of carcinogenic drugs in livestock used for slaughter, such as Phenylbutazone (or “bute”), a non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drug that racehorses are given as a matter of course.
The point is, that racehorses—and horses in general—may be beloved among Americans, they may be celebrated by the media, but they suffer worse abuse than the routine brutality that cows endure at slaughter. The dead Thoroughbreds should haunt every racing enthusiast and humanitarian, not just because of how they’re transported and slaughtered. How about the vast sums they make for owners who maintain a profitable relationship with kill buyers, ensuring the betrayal of 10,000 Thoroughbreds every year?
Consider No Day Off, a filly taken from Mountaineer racetrack in Virginia to Sugarcreek and on to Richelieu Meats in Canada. HBO captured her story on undercover video: the weekly pickups arranged at the race track by her owner/trainer, Ricardo Hernandez, to clear the slow horses out of the barn; her arrival at Sugarcreek where she was purchased by a kill buyer; and her arrival at the slaughterhouse.
The same fate befell Deputy Broad this past summer. Less than 48 hours after coming in last in a July 11 race at Mountaineer, his trainer, Danny Bird, had an Ohio kill buyer pick up the colt for transport to Richelieu. He arrived on July 19 and was confirmed slaughtered, according to online reports. Bird didn’t even give Deputy Broad the chance to be adopted by a rescue. Stable to table in less than seven days.
Mountaineer has rules against trainers doing this, but doesn’t enforce them—same as at other racetracks. Why? The circle of money, flowing from the betting public to the race tracks to the owners. To them, every racehorse is an investment, and this particular kind easily loses value with age, injury and races lost to other horses.
Don’t kid yourselves that the owners treat their horses the way other people treat their dogs. Some do, but for most, it’s just another part of their portfolio. They may love the sport passionately, but they’re very upfront about their desire to compete, win and make money. And, as one billionaire noted recently, racing is a tough business to make money in.
Even so, some of the biggest money earners get slaughtered, right alongside the losers. Kentucky Derby winner and Horse of the Year Ferdinand was slaughtered in 2002, in Japan. His lifetime earnings of $3.7 million made him, at one time, the fifth-leading money earner of the Thoroughbred world, with a stud fee set at $30,000.00 upon his retirement from racing. But he stopped producing foals and was sent to slaughter by his owners at age nineteen.
With lifetime earnings of $1.6 million, Exceller was, and still is, the only horse to have defeated two Triple Crown winners, Affirmed and Seattle Slew. But he was ordered slaughtered in 1997 by his owner, Göte Östlund. Two years after his death, Exceller was elected to the National Museum of Racing and Hall of Fame in Saratoga Springs, NY.
Consistent with its mission to “interpret the history and convey the excitement of Thoroughbred racing in America to the broadest possible audience,” the museum avoids any mention of Exceller’s manner of death on his honorary plaque, just the year that he died. Its web site does, however, broach the topic, by lying: “He was later sold to a Swedish owner whose financial problems led to Exceller being put down at the age of 24,” it states.
Slaughtering a horse for meat is not “putting it down.” It is not euthanasia. The museum knows that full well, but the public doesn’t, and many in the racing industry and the media would prefer it stay that way.
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