Quote:
Originally Posted by Danzig
on the latter-you don't have to use the stuff. i just would hate to see those who need it not be able to have it.
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You act like these horses are pets. It would be comical if it weren't so naive. There are PLENTY of horsemen that don't give a crap about the horses. Why are they so interested in keeping Lasix legal? It surely isn't about the horses.
Before anybody lectures me on how everybody loves horses, I'll offer up Anew, a horse that ran in the last race at Penn National tonight. He is an 11 year old gelding that came back to the races off a 4 and a half layoff. Yes, 4 and a half years. Steve Asmussen was the trainer. He brought the former stakes winner back for 25k claimers, lost, and dropped him to 15k. He lost interest in a hurry. Luckily for him, he washed his hands of the horse when David "the butcher" Jacobson claims him.
Jacobson enters him back for 7.5k and wins a purse, hooray, then runs him for 15k and loses badly. He decides to ship him to Prx where he dumps him in a 7.5k conditioned race, the horse dumps the rider at the start, and runs around the track only to return to a new barn. Yes, some idiot named Richard Vega was dumb enough to claim him.
The horse race tonight for the fourth time under Vega's "care". After three miserable efforts at Prx for 7.5k, the horse was shipped to Pen to run for 4k where again he was not competitive.
So, what is the point? I'm tired of hearing this "the horse comes first" bullsh!t, because that is what it is...bullsh!t. Sure, the guy at Pen is some loser trainer that is probably trying to scrape by and recoup some money. That doesn't excuse him from the way this horse is being handled. But forget him for a minute. The other horses are big names in the game. Jacobson is a leading trainer on the biggest circuit in the game, the NYRA circuit. Asmussen is one of the biggest trainers in the game, period.
So, I ask again, spare me the "it is in the best interest of the horse" crap. We all know that line is only used when it is convenient to use it. We also know for every Anew out there, I could scan the PPs every week and find several horses just like him. Three trainers, two nationally prominent, have had the chance to do the right thing. None of them have.