Blog

Blog Response May 14, 08

Julie Painter of Port Orange, Florida, sends these comments to add to our conversation about Eight Belle's death:
    Showing the final death throes of a horse, who has given her life for her masters and her sport, would have been a mistake.  As Sally Jenkins mentions in her May 5 column (in the Daytona News-Journal), 'Death was a painful look at the harsh truth that horses want to run and they want to please us. They will run at our pleasure until they fall.  To have shown that on TV at the time it happened would have been not just poor taste but cruel and detrimental to the innocents in the home viewing audience.We were already affected by the obvious loss.'
      As for what can be done so these tragedies stop and the sport of kings contiunes, I have a few suggestions to make horse racing safer for the horses, our equine athletes.  We must give up our love of unreasonable speed and breed better seed for sturdiness and balance.  Do away with the January 1 birthday for all thoroughbreds so that mere chidlren in horse years are not out there straining their bodies beyond any limit we would force upon our young dancers, Olympian entertainers, and other human ahteletes, for whom we have only slightly more respect.