Quote:
|
Originally Posted by Danzig
yeah, the new york times and washington post won't care about a mare who ruptures an aorta during foaling..
but that's the thing, in a way peta is after all of that, as they want no exploitation of animals at all...and if we own any animals, we're exploiting them-according to them. absolutely ridiculous. i wonder if my dog feels exploited about the fact she hasn't got to do any more hunting for food than walking to her bowl?
|
Oh yeah, right; it's all the liberal media's fault.
Did you read the piece?
Thanks for the link, Steve; I wouldn't have seen it otherwise. A few things it leaves me wondering- in every piece I've read about this (some sympathetic to horse racing, some less so) is that they all bring up the racing at 2 thing. Racing at 2 isn't a new thing, and in fact, two-year-olds start later now than they did decades ago, right? Maybe it's a bad comparison, as it's not a sport with a great PR record, either, but it reminds me of women's gymnastics, where a fully grown adult can't go into the sport because there's been too much of a loss of the physical attributes needed for the sport by the time a person is fully grown. I was under the impression the early training affects the development of the racehorse's physique, enabling him to continue to run. Is that wrong?
I also don't understand him arguing for fewer starts for racehorses- isn't part of the reason they run less often that they're more fragile now, and the horse who has run several times is usually a sounder animal?
It just seems to me that the problem is breeding for precocious speed, and that fewer starts, not racing at 2, synthetic tracks, all of it, are just treatments for the cause, because that's cheaper than addressing the cause, which would require a huge shift in breeding practices.
In the end, this will be a lot of screaming and yelling for nothing. States want the gambling revenue, so they have no motivation to change racing, and racing is run by breeding, so there's no motivation to change things there, either.
But I'm not a racehorse breeder, like the author of this piece, nor an owner or trainer, so I may likely be missing something here. Wouldn't be the first time...