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Originally Posted by sumitas
I'm a fan of the game and have entered into a breeding partnership for a foal due March '07. We put a lot of thought and time into the breeding to bring a foal to auction that will enhance the breed and have a rock solid chance to win races at the highest level.
So I am shocked to learn all of these unseemly, probably some are illegal, activities within horse racing. I will proceed with the partnership and hope horse racing is cleaned up and made safer. I don't want our foal, or any foal, in a world of abuse.
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It's much worse than you could ever imagine. Whatever the worst case scenario is in your mind, in reality it's about 1000x worse than you could ever imagine. The stuff that goes on is really bad. There are so many problems that I wouldn't even know where to begin.
One huge problem, as the article said, is that there are a lot of horses with serious injuries that are running in races every day. The problem is that if they got really strict and didn't allow hurt horses to run, then you would have a ton of 5 horse fields.
There are no easy answers that would solve all the problems in racing. There needs to be a ton of changes made though. They need to turn everything upside down. One important change that needs to be made is to have uniform drug rules that apply in all states. Right now they have different rules in different states. It's amazing how badly most states do not want uniform drug rules. Kentucky has always had the most lenient drug rules in the country. They finally decided that something needed to be done to get thier rules more in line with other states, so they made their rules a little stricter to be more in line with other states. The horsemen in Kentucky were up in arms. They threatened to boycott. They said the new rules were way too harsh. The Kentucky racing commision had to back down somewhat beacuse the horsemen were going to boycott. What a joke! Why can't they play by the same rules as everyone else. The Ky horsemen acted like the new rules were so terrible that there was no way they could live with these new rules. I would have let them boycott, but that's beacuse I have no stake in it. The Ky racing commission backed down because they didn't want to cost the state money and the state would have lost money if there was a boycott and there was no racing. One of the problems is that the the fox is basically guarding the hen-house.