Outside the Santa Anita track, animal rights activists had been heckling racegoers under a banner that read “horseracing kills horses.” They had a call-and-response going: 'Just like us!', 'Horses feel pain!', 'Just like us!'.
WILLIAM FINEGAN: What happened at the Breeders’ Cup World Championships in late 2019 looked like the end of horse racing in California, maybe in America. It was the twelfth and final race of a two-day series, at Santa Anita Park, the storied track near Los Angeles. Sixty-eight thousand people packed the Art Deco grandstand, the apron, the infield, the high-priced suites. The “handle” — the total betting for the day — was a healthy hundred and seventeen million dollars, but thoroughbred racing itself was on life support. Since the beginning of the year, thirty-five horses had died at Santa Anita. Public dismay had risen to the point that Gavin Newsom, California’s governor, had told the Times that racing’s “time is up” if it did not reform. Dianne Feinstein, the state’s senior senator, had released a letter calling the Breeders’ Cup races a “critical test for the future of horseracing.”
Outside the track, animal-rights activists had been heckling racegoers under a banner that read “horseracing kills horses.” They had a call-and-response going, street corner to street corner: “Horses don’t want to be forced to run!” “Just like us!” “Horses feel pain!” “Just like us!” Heather Wilson, a nurse anesthetist, wore huge fake eyelashes and an absurd cocked hat. “I’m making fun of the women who think that killing horses is glamorous,” she told me. “My hat is quasi-glam.” She had been arrested at a previous protest at Santa Anita. “Right now, our focus is on California,” she said. “Just get it on the ballot.” She meant a statewide referendum, which she felt sure would result in a ban…
The activists outside, suggesting that horses don’t like to race, were half right. Running fast comes naturally to thoroughbreds, but racers need to be trained to outrun opponents. Most, it is thought, need “encouragement”—whipping—to continue going hard when they’re tired. Racehorses, especially those running on oval tracks, give their lower legs a terrible pounding, straining ligaments, tendons, joints…
Thoroughbred racing, once the most popular spectator sport in America, has been in decline since Alexander started on the car lot. Attendance at Santa Anita was bad even before covid-19… The terrible parade of dead horses at Santa Anita in 2019 drove the sport into an identity crisis, and not just in California. I heard it when I talked to horse people in Florida, Maryland, New York, and especially bluegrass Kentucky, the industry’s headquarters: the defensiveness, the virtue signalling, the pleas for understanding—but we love our horses. The opponents of racing seemed increasingly confident that it would soon go the way of circus elephants, dolphin shows, dog racing, all the discredited animal entertainments.
What went wrong at Santa Anita? The abolitionists liked to say it was just business as usual—horse torture and murder. The apologists said it was business as usual, too—racehorses have always died, even before bleeding-heart outsiders started paying attention. But it wasn’t business as usual. Horses were dying every single week. They were dying during workouts, during races, on turf and on dirt. Colts, fillies, geldings. Obscure claimers, first-time runners, a famous stakes winner during a workout. The deaths started to make the Los Angeles Times, and social media picked up the scent. More protesters appeared at the track. People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals [PETA] demanded that Newsom shut down Santa Anita. “Something is drastically wrong,” Art Sherman, a trainer in his eighties, told the Times. “I’ve been around a long time and have never seen this”…
Patrick Battuello, who runs the activist group Horseracing Wrongs, calls the idea of racing-as-sport “the Big Lie.” Its athletes are drugged, whipped, trained and raced too young, pushed to the breaking point and beyond; though they’re social animals, they spend most of their work lives in solitary confinement in a stall. Among those not killed by racing, a great many — PETA estimates ten thousand American thoroughbreds annually—will ultimately be slaughtered, nearly all of them in Canada and Mexico. Q.E.D.
Peter Singer, the Australian philosopher who wrote the founding text of the modern animal-rights movement, “Animal Liberation,” in 1975, attacks animal ownership itself. “If possessing a higher degree of intelligence does not entitle one human to use another for his or her own ends, how can it entitle humans to exploit non-humans?” he asks. Sentient beings should not be treated as commodities. Singer compares speciesism to sexism and racism—they are all the same mechanism, the same self-serving delusion of superiority.
There is a broader abolitionist movement, opposing “animal slavery,” meaning livestock and pets. Battuello, in a column, put the pet part succinctly: “Adopt, don’t buy. The ultimate solution, however, is sterilize to extinction. A petless society is compassionate. A petless society is rational. A petless society is progress.” He advocated the same approach, “sterilize to extinction,” for racehorses—thoroughbreds, quarter horses, standardbreds, “and everything in between.”
It is speciesist to ride a horse, to perpetuate the property status of animals. Animal-rights abolitionists look for inspiration to the methods and the eventual success of classical abolitionism in destroying chattel slavery. They are on thin ethical ice when they equate human beings and draft animals, just as they are when comparing the livestock industry to the Holocaust. But, in the nineteenth century, the movement to end cruelty to animals was on a parallel track to the abolitionist movement, with some of the same players. And it was met with incredulity, much as anti-slavery sentiment was in the American South.
Today’s abolitionists tend to scorn “welfarists” — reformers whose goals are incremental, basically meant to produce a “happy slave.” When PETA works with the horse industry to reduce whipping, the harder-line activists consider it contemptible appeasement. Battuello maintains a database of racehorse deaths, filing Freedom of Information Act requests with state racing commissions to come up with figures far higher than the Jockey Club’s. He counts training breakdowns and stall deaths, and estimates that more than two thousand racehorses are killed—they don’t die, they are killed—each year in this country, all for, as he puts it, “two-dollar bets.” Racing people are not having an identity crisis, he told me: “They know exactly what they are. They’re animal exploitation”…
In California, where alligator shoes have been banned and a ballot measure to improve the lives of farm animals passed by a huge margin, the future of horse racing is hard to see. But the state’s Native American gambling juggernaut has a new ballot measure in the works for 2022. It proposes to confine the next wave of gaming, “sports betting,” to its casinos and approved racetracks, meaning Santa Anita, Del Mar, Golden Gate Fields, and Los Alamitos. Why voters would approve the measure is an open question. Why the casinos, with their deep pockets, would extend this proposal to the tracks is another. SOURCE…
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