Bob Baffert, the owner of the Kentucky Derby winner, Medina Spirit admitted to treating Medina with a medication that contained a steroid before he won the race. Most race horses are pumped legally and otherwise, with performance-enhancing, injury-masking and pain-numbing chemicals.
Patrick Battuello, founder of Horseracingwrongs stated, “The typical racehorse is torn from his mother as a mere babe, thrust into intensive training at 18 months — years before his body is fully developed — and first raced at 2, the rough equivalent of a first-grader. From there, the incessant grinding — again, on an unformed skeleton — begins, because if he’s not racing, he’s not earning. He is confined (alone, in a tiny stall for more than 23 hours a day), commodified (lip tattoos, auctions, “claiming races”), controlled (cribbing collars, nose chains, tongue ties, blinkers) and cowed (bits and whips). And quite often, killed. In addition, hundreds more die back in their stalls from things like colic or laminitis, or, simply, are “found dead in the morning.”
Some 10,000 to 20,000 horse races annually are used up in the eyes of the owners or simply no-longer wanted and are dumped into the slaughter pipeline and mercilessly bled-out and butchered at “career’s end.”
Horse racing is horrific animal cruelty.
For more information go to horseracingwrongs.org.
Silvie Pomicter
Chinchilla