The Death of Eight Belles: Enough is Enough
I watched the Kentucky Derby yesterday. I’ve watched on again and off again for years. As a young person I owned a couple of horses and fell in love with the species. That they carry humans on their backs with little complaint is a choice - a decision the animal makes. There is no contest between an animal weighing hundreds of pounds and a weak human being. The animal wins, every single time. Except that this animal chooses to win by teaming with us. All you have to do is spend some time with them to realize this. Horses know what they are doing.
And if asked, they will run until they die. It’s up to human beings to stop them. The horrible breakdown and death of Eight Belles in the aftermath of the race yesterday reminded me of the family Labrador, Daisy. Daisy is fetch crazy. She’ll chase anything that is thrown. A true water dog, one of her favorite games is to fetch things (sticks, balls, toys) thrown from shore of a local lake. Daisy will charge in, head high, never taking her eyes off the object, and will swim out long distances to snag it and bring it back. She will do this over and over and over again, until she is past exhaustion. She will not stop. She has to be stopped.
I learned this the hard way one summer day. I knew she was tiring but thought she had one more swim in her. On the way back, the fatigue got to her for just a moment and her head slipped beneath the water, where she aspirated. A coughing dog with wild eyes came to the surface a few seconds later. The price she and I both paid for my lapse in judgement was a lung infection that took weeks of antibiotics and restrained activity to beat. But we were lucky. She was young and strong, and beat it she did.
Yesterday, the same lapse in judgment was in full evidence at the Kentucky Derby. We are so enamored of the courage and strength of the animals who perform for us that we forget that we are the adults, and they are the children. They are smart children, and in the case of horses, they choose to run just as Daisy chooses to swim, with joy - but it is the responsibility of the owners and the trainers to know when enough is enough. Eight Belles ran until she exhausted her body’s ability to cope with the pounding of thoroughbred ankles on a dirt track packed to the surface hardness of concrete, and then ran beyond - seconding the Derby but smashing her front ankles beyond any hope of survival. Euthanized on the track, her last minutes of life were spent in agony.
Her owners and trainers are grief-stricken, but brushed off any sense of responsibility. They are responsible. It doesn’t matter what the proximate cause of her breakdown was; they are the adults. Those of us who continue to celebrate the cult of horse racing are also responsible. I placed bets on the Derby at a party yesterday and the money I won and celebrated (12.50 on a 2.00 bet on Big Brown) today feels like blood money. I’m donating it to the SPCA, not that this will do a thing to help that extraordinary filly. Like Barbaro before her, too much was too much for Eight Belles - and like my Daisy, her caretakers are to blame.
I came off my love for the sport (but not my love of horses) when I learned about the number of animals being run on Buspar. The incredible amount of doping in horseracing (which makes any human scandal pale by the sheer frequency and amount of drug use) remains a dirty little secret. There are more consequences of our collective greed found in inbreeding and the steadily increasing, disproportionate body mass that results, relative to the positively dainty ankles of a thoroughbred.
And finally there is the track itself. We started putting synthetics in tracks for humans a couple of decades ago, avoiding who knows how many ankle, knee and hip injuries. It’s taken horse racing a long time to catch up but slowly, ever so slowly, tracks are being remade. Barbaro’s ultimately fatal injury in the Preakness two year ago spurred things along. Two of the horses in this year’s Derby had only run on synthetics; Churchill Downs was the first time they had touched hoof to dirt in a money race.
Well, the Downs needs to take a long look at the cost of adherence to tradition - and that’s just a start. Horseracing as a whole has become the bullfighting of America, where 2 horses a day, on average, break down and must be euthanized . And for what? For the comfortably oblivious, screaming crowds; for the money betters who know the real game and don’t care; and most of all for the golden ring grabbed at by owners and breeders alike; the remote possibility of starting a winning dynasty, a breeding line that will send hundreds of millions back up the family tree for decades to come.
Enough is a enough. The sport needs an overhaul, and if it won’t do it itself, then it needs to be regulated as are professional sports for humans. For myself, I’ll confess that I am conflicted. Big Brown is a beautiful horse and he won pulling away, which augurs well for the Belmont should he breeze through the Preakness. What person who loves to watch horses run doesn’t thrill to the sight of a born champion running for the joy of it, charging past the finish line?
Still, I don’t think I’ll watch. I’m too afraid that I’ll see Barbaro instead of Big Brown. That I’ll remember my black Lab Daisy and stand with hands clenched, waiting for a breakdown. I’ll think I’ll save my money and my time, and spend it on yet another dog that our family has rescued.
All of which, of course, is too little, too late, and completely meaningless for Eight Belles. Let’s hope her death doesn’t turn out to be meaningless, too.
