Hanging on by a Thread

35 thoughts on Hanging on by a Thread

1. Luckily he came through surgery OK–they had to fuse his fetlock joint, and his leg is held together with TWENTY-THREE screws–but he’s up and eating. Recovery will be very long and hard, but he’s doing as well as can be expected at the moment. The Blood-Horse is a good source of info on his status.

2. Off-topic, but sorta related, is the performance of Danica Patrick in a different kind of racing…the Indianapolis 500. She’s had a lousy month fighting a car that won’t handle and isn’t fast (as has her team-mates, which should prove to her critics that it isn’t a “girl” thing).

   Unlike Barbaro, however, she pulled through. Saturday in pole-day qualifying, she turned in an excellent performance, averaging 224-plus mph in her four laps to solidly land at tenth fastest (inside, row 4) for the field.

   Can’t wait to see how she does on race-day. Go Danica!

3. Thanks for the links.

   I started to cry when I saw the coverage on the news; I usually watch all the Triple Crown races live, but was unable to Saturday. Yesterday afternoon, I obsessively checked the internet and radio for updates on his status. He won the Derby so beautifully — such a handsome horse, and so playful (he kept nipping and nuzzling the horses of the outriders).

   May he have decades of happy stud-dom ahead of him.

4. Every time this happens I feel guilty for enjoying the Triple Crown races – the only ones I watch. I don’t suppose it helps that I was addicted to Marguerite Henry as a child, and still tear up at the ending of “Black Gold”.

5. I hope Barbaro recovers and thrives, but I’d be perfectly happy if his owners never made a penny from him again. I know that in some sense these racing folks “love” their horses, but let’s face it: When you truly love an animal, you don’t fuiously whip its hindquarters to make it run at dangerously unnatural speeds and risk catastrophic injury, all so that you can take home millions of dollars in prize money and stud fees.

   People who really care about horses might consider saving their Triple Crown betting dollars and donating them instead to the effort to save America’s wild horses—truly beautiful creatures who run fast because they want to, breed when they feel like it, and are being slaughtered by the thousands because they aren’t doing their part to line anyone’s pocketbook.

6. Jim, I noticed that Danica worked out a tenth-place start in a shitty car. What happened? Last year, Rahal-Letterman Racing had the fastest car in the field (Danica would have taken the pole, but for a wobble that she surprised everyone by catching), and Danica came perilously close to winning. This year, they just can’t find handling or horsepower.

   The public won’t likely see it this way, but I think we’ll learn more about what she’s got by watching Danica try to work a mediocre car up through the field over 200 laps that we did watching her be alternately brilliant and inexperienced in a great car last year.

7. Last year, Rahal-Letterman Racing had the fastest car in the field … and Danica came perilously close to winning. This year, they just can’t find handling or horsepower.

   Last year, Rahal-Letterman and Andretti-Green were the only teams with Honda engines, which were much faster than the others. This year, the others are gone, everyone has the same powerplant, and Penske is back in its usual place up front.

8. I remember seeing Go For Wand break down during the 1990 Breeder’s Cup. That was beyond horrific. Barbaro’s jockey stopping him as fast as he did may be the difference between life and death.

9. See also: http://www.retirement.bloodhorse.com for various rescue and/or welfare organzations for retired throroughbreds. Here in KY, you can get a retired racehorse who had either been injured or had a less than stellar career for very little money. Some stables will give them away to a good home and someone willing to care for them.

   It’s despicable how these horses are bred, trained, used up and then thrown away. If I only had the resources, I’d have a farm full of these darlings!!

10. Definitely, Chicklet. Edgar Prado deserves a big, big fan club for acting and thinking that quickly. So, it deserves to be said, does Brother Derek’s jockey, who pulled his horse quickly away from Barbaro when Barbaro started to bobble–that probably saved both horses’ lives.

11. Last year, Rahal-Letterman and Andretti-Green were the only teams with Honda engines

    I feel silly for forgetting that. However, RLR is having trouble finding a good setup as well.

12. I hope that Barbaro recovers, too, but if he doesn’t, I’m sure they’ll swiftly put him down. Any injury that detracts from a horse’s performance renders him pretty much useless to his owners, who don’t tend to have real strong emotional attachments to the animals that they have to abuse pretty harshly to keep performing. Just saying.

13. If the fracture doesn’t heal, I’m not sure there’s much else they could do. From what I’ve read, if the horse can’t use one leg the opposing leg tends to give way from the excess strain, and the fracture in this case is pretty bad – he broke a pastern bone, cannon bone and sesamoid, one of them into more than twenty pieces. On the plus side he’s survived coming out of anaesthesia – that was what killed Ruffian; she thrashed around, reinjured her leg and had to be put down.
    Barbaro, incidentally, is distantly related to Ruffian through Native Dancer.

14. They don’t have to “abuse” the horses into running — at least not the way some folks seem to think. Trust me, the horses want to run. Or let me put it another way — if you think a jockey who weighs maybe 115 pounds soaking wet is going to make an 1100 pound horse do anything the horse isn’t already inclined to do, you haven’t worked with too many horses. But that’s part of the insidious complexity of the exploitation at work here. The horses do what they’re bred to do, and they’re bred to run. They’re not bred for long-term soundness, or a well-rounded healthiness. They’re also running hard and training hard at very young ages. In the racing industry, Thoroughbreds are on the track and racing at the age of two, when their bones are still forming. In other fields of horsemanship, you don’t even start riding a horse until it’s three, and in the field of dressage (depending on the breed of horse) you might wait until the horse is four, and even then the work will be light. In racing, however, the horse has to show its best performance in its youth if it’s going to be worth anything. And for every big money winner, there’s a bunch of other horses that weren’t profitable that get sold off the track, many with soundness problems, all of which need a good deal of additional training in order to be useful (or even pleasant) to deal with in other pursuits. Oh, and don’t get me started about insurance fraud. Sometimes a horse is worth a lot more dead than alive.

    All I have to say about the whole thing is thank goodness horses have an 11 month gestation period and don’t give birth in litters. Otherwise, they’d be treating horses the same way they do greyhounds.

15. PS– even with all that, I still love to watch the Triple Crown races. This year, though, I have to say I’m glad I missed the Preakness.

16. He won the Derby so beautifully — such a handsome horse, and so playful (he kept nipping and nuzzling the horses of the outriders

    Hugo, that’s not playfulness, it’s aggression. Barbaro may be a great runner, but he’s not nice horse. He bites. A lot.

    Any injury that detracts from a horse’s performance renders him pretty much useless to his owners, who don’t tend to have real strong emotional attachments to the animals that they have to abuse pretty harshly to keep performing. Just saying.

    Except that he’s got tremendous potential value if he can stand at stud, even if he’s not racing anymore. I have more than a sneaking suspicion that they would have put him down immediately if he’d been a gelding.

    And this isn’t about “emotional attachment”. It’s about the fact that horses that can’t walk with their weight evenly distributed develop tons of medical problems and are so severely impaired that there’s almost nothing to be done. Even people who are deeply attached to their pets put them down when they realize how great their suffering is likely to be.

17. From a monetary point of view, all this expensive surgery may be worth it to the owners. I don’t really follow horse-racing, but I’ve read quite a few of Dick Francis’ thrillers about horse racing. While the horse will obviously never race again, he will apparently command high stud fees because of his past record. So not to sound cynical, but the owners may not be doing this out of fondness for the animal. Besides, I’ve heard that racehorses usually live at the stables which belong to their trainers rather than their owners, so it’s not like it’s a beloved pet they see every day. Mind you, I’ll defer to the superior knowledge of anybody who actually knows something about the subject, as opposed to gleaning it from fiction!

18. Horse racing is f*cked up. Every year in America, 86,000 horses, many of which are thoroughbreds, are sold to slaughterhouses to be used for pet food or meat in European and Asian countries. I won’t watch the greyhounds, either. Shit is just sad. Too often, the poor things run themselves to death. 🙁

19. Well, speaking as someone who’s spent *a lot* of time around horses, farms, and racetracks, I can tell you that Barbaro is worth millions of dollars in syndication. Smarty Jones, who just missed out on winning the Triple Crown, was syndicated for close to $50 million dollars and his stud fee is $100,000. His book is 110 mares, so that’s the potential for another $10 million per year. Anyway you look at it, it’s a shit ton of money.

    Besides, I’ve heard that racehorses usually live at the stables which belong to their trainers rather than their owners, so it’s not like it’s a beloved pet they see every day.

    Quite true. Trainers and grooms are the ones who work with the horse regularly.

20. Jenny, the owners probably would have been better off financially to put him down. Insurance is cheap; $300,000 in premium gets about $10m in insurance, and they may have insured him for as much as $30 million. He was an undefeated Derby winner going into the Preakness, and a leg injury would not hamper his value as a sire. The reason owners put horses down for leg injuries is that horses do not recover well from them. They can not convalesce like people can. their own weight tends to injure them if they lay around; they live on their feet. A horse with a leg break has a hard time keeping the weight off it, and can reinjure it over and over, suffering and eventually dying. So, they could have had them euthanized at the track, or at the hospital once the severity of the injury became clear. They would have recouped most or all of the economic value. If he lives, they will stud him, which is worth far more than the value of any future track winnings. If he doesn’t, it will be because he has a painful injury that will not heal and it would be cruel to make him limp around until swelling caused gangrene; not because he’s of no use to them.

21. Oh, yes, as a Derby winner he’s already worth quite a bit at stud (very few top horses race very long, these days, unless they’re geldings, since stud fees pay better). To stand at stud, though, he’ll have to have reasonable soundness in those back legs, since as far as I know natural cover is still required for Thoroughbred registration. That’s all assuming, of course, that he is fertile.
    From what I’ve read, if they’d known just how bad the injury was they’d have put him down at the racecourse.

22. I can understand from what you’re saying that a horse like Barbaro would probably still have some financial value as a stud. But for me, that’s not the point. Horses like Barbaro are obviously atypical, and the ones that don’t net their owners or investors tons of money are often sold to slaughterhouses. 800 more die each year from injuries they suffered while racing. I won’t support horseracing because horses shouldn’t have to incur injuries that might necessitate euthanasia so that I can be entertained. And while I’m at it, horses, running in a circle? Even at incredibly high speeds it’s… Not so entertaining to me.

23. Nolo, thanks for the good post. You’re spot-on about the shortsighted motivations and the bald exploitation inherent in the racing industry (and it’s an industry more than a sport).

    Jenny:

    I won’t support horseracing because horses shouldn’t have to incur injuries that might necessitate euthanasia so that I can be entertained.

    Yep.

24. Fair enough, but I think that’s a separate set of criticisms (and applicable to other areas, too, such as greyhound racing). I grew up entrenched in the horse business. My mother has run a farm (including breeding race horses) since I was about 6. Her current business partner is an equine orthopedic surgeon. And horseracing is, at its core, a business. You do what makes (and saves) you money. But the people involved in it, for the most part, love their animals. I’ve yet to meet owners who weren’t horse people and didn’t genuinely love it.

    Interestingly enough, most of the people that I’ve encountered are very much opposed to the slaughterhouse practices and many are involved in rescue operations.

    p.s. Ledasmom: thoroughbreds still require live cover. I’m not exactly sure why, seeing as how it’s actually riskier for the horses than AI, but traditions abound in the horse business.

25. I just spent four years in Saratoga Springs, NY, and never once went to the races. Because no sport should involve killing off the brightest talents after a single injury. It makes me sick to my stomach.

26. Apparently, a lot of the time, owners who sell their horses at auction are unaware that slaughterhouses are bidding on the horses.

27. I won’t support horseracing because horses shouldn’t have to incur injuries that might necessitate euthanasia so that I can be entertained.

    Perfectly good reason. I wasn’t taking a position on the industry, just making a point about the specific situation.

28. evil_fizz makes some good points (and thank you Lizard for the nice compliment). There’s a lot to criticize in the horse business, but we’ve come a long way from what the horse business was like back when horses were the main source of transportation power. People do tend to get into it because they love horses, and I don’t think many people go into it thinking they’ll get rich. Moreover, in one of those weird paradoxes that life throws at us, it’s hard to get away from the fact that without the horse business, there’d be a lot fewer horses in the world. As a species, the horse (like the cow) has become dependent on the fact humans have a use for it.

    Which gets me back to the incredibly conflicting horseracing biz, and the weird unholy pact I have with it that lets me watch the Triple Crown races every year (for the most part). I know the business has its ugly side, buried far beneath the glamourous exterior of Churchill Downs and Pimlico, but the horses are such incredible, beautiful athletes. And they are athletes– it’s not like watching trained bears at a circus, or orcas forced to flop around in the sordid little bathtubs of Sea World. I’ve never ridden in a race, but I’ve ridden enough horses to know that quite a few of them just like to run, and quite a few of those won’t settle for being in the back of the pack. The horses really want to do this, and there’s a great naive heroic power to it all.

    Just please, please, you Thorougbred breeders, breed better legs into these big hearted creatures you raise.

29. nolo, I think it’s going to be a loooong time before you can breed horses with some lower leg muscle, but it’d be nice. It’s kind of odd, because horses’ legs seem like an all over design flaw. (Why would you want a thousand pound animal running on its fingernails?)

    It’d also be good if they stopped racing equine adolescents. I know people who won’t race 2-year-olds on principle, which I think is reasonable, even if you miss out on some of the money. But of course, the most prestige is for 3-year-olds, so that’s where people gravitate.

30. Nolo, you’re quite right. In a way, I kind of hope Barbaro doesn’t survive, because if he does, no doubt he’ll be put to stud, and breeding a horse that has shattered a leg like that really isn’t the way to ensure sound offspring. Thoroughbreds already have so many problems with bone girth and soundness, they don’t really need people encouraging fragile-boned bloodlines. It would be really cynical and mercenary to put him to stud, since he’s likely to throw fragile-legged offspring who may win races, but would probably have short, disastrous careers. It might be financially worth it to his owners to produce bad racehorses, but it isn’t very humane at all.

31. Is the fragility of their legs because they’ve been selectively bred for so long? I mean, if you’re trying to create a new generation of racehorse, presumably you want one with a slender build as opposed to big heavy bones, because it doesn’t carry as much weight and can therefore go faster. I mean, I’ve seen plough-horses, and they’ve got legs like tree trunks, and it’d proibably take a tornado to knock them over, but they aren’t exactly fast.

    Seems to me if they were wild, then natural selection would find the best balance between speed and sturdiness. Obviously a horse that can run away from a predator has a survival trait, but a horse with thin, brittle bones would be more likely to break a leg when they took a tumble, and would therefore either die of its injuries or be eaten by a predator because a genetic disposition to running fast doesn’t help if the animal CAN’T run anymore because its bones snapped when it fell.

    But humans would be far more concerned with speed than durability, at least for racehorses rather than horses that are pulling wagons, carriages, etc. So selective breeding could have bred in traits that aren’t very good for the animal, but are good for the owner. i.e. If the odds of a horse falling and breaking a limb in a race are reasonably low, a human would want to maximize the chance of winning and therefore getting lots of money, even if it’s a lousy strategy for the individual horse if that horse does happen to fall. And heaven knows , many purebred dogs and cats have plenty of health problems, none of which were bred in deliberately, but arose as a result of certain traits being favoured by the breeders: hip dysplasia in German Shepherds, deafness in Dalmations, respiratory problems in bulldogs and related breeds, etc.

32. In general, smaller hooves=smaller legs=greater speed. However, some genetic lines have a greater propensity to leg trouble and breakdowns – Ruffian’s sire Reviewer broke down three times. There’s a theory that Native Dancer passed on a weak-legs gene to many of his descendents. Of course, Native Dancer’s an ancestor to a heck of a lot of top racehorses.

33. Some of the problems you see in racehorses are due to inbreeding. (It’s worse in standardbreds than thoroughbreds, but you see it fairly often, especially in fertility issues.)

    When you breed horses for speed, you’re breeding them to put addition force and stress on their legs. If you look at horses, there’s no power in their lower legs. You look at their butts, entirely different story. Anatomically, horses are well suited to running and jumping, but when you’re running as fast as a Kentucky Derby winner, a misstep is going to be horrendous because of (among other things) the torque on the knee.

34. Yeah, yeah…

    Not for some real insight: Danica Patrick is HOT!

35. FWIW, show breeders probably annoy me more than race breeders.

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