Fifteen years ago, California was at a crossroads.
In response to calls for heightened equine safety measures, the state industry’s governing body mandated a switch from dirt to synthetic racetrack surfaces, what would prove for various reasons a largely ill-fated venture resulting in all but one changeling track making the switch back to dirt only a few years later.
The precipitating factor behind the synthetics experiment — the high number of fatalities — had spilled over into the media, though largely confined to California-centric publications like the San Diego Union-Tribune. Among those familiar with the boardroom chatter, this watershed move was largely industry-driven, an effort in-house to lasso a problem before it bolted from the barn.
Cut to the Santa Anita welfare crisis of two years ago, and media and public scrutiny couldn’t have been more different, with national and international media outlets like CNN turning their lens to the Southern California facility. Television news trucks camped out during morning training. A single article in the Los Angeles Times, regarding the 23rd fatality at Santa Anita that spring, had nearly 4,800 shares. That paper maintains a running count of equine fatalities to this day.
A parallel with the photo that circulated of Irish trainer Gordon Elliott astride a dead horse in his care, and the volcano of disgust that erupted, is obvious: A sense that the industry, like the fabled Rip Van Winkle, had been asleep for an extended period, only to wake in a world vastly changed.
Indeed, British journalist Lydia Hislop wrote a typically insightful analysis of the Elliott photo in which she asks the question: “What I want to address is why the racing industry has chosen this incident, above all others, on which to visit loud, unprompted and more or less unanimous censure?”
In it, Hislop gives a nod to the slippery complexion of shared morality, and the idea that attitudes and social mores that were commonplace as recently as five years ago are suddenly “outdated and inappropriate to contemporary eyes”.
And so, if public sentiment towards the use of horses for sport and entertainment is indeed undergoing a rapid metamorphosis, what’s next for the racing industry?
The court of public opinion
Camie Heleski, a senior lecturer at the animal and food sciences department of the University of Kentucky, has spent many a waking hour thinking about the evolving nature of the human-animal bond. Her first port of call with her undergraduate students is a primer on semantics.
“We spend some time initially talking about the difference between animal welfare and animal rights,” said Heleski. “If they’re not clear on that, it’s hard to even have a logical discussion.”
Many of the articles Heleski has co-authored on this issue can be read as cautionary tales — a turning on of the lighthouse beacons when the storm clouds have already gathered and the waters are choppy.
In a paper published nearly ten years ago, Heleski warned that, if certain training practices or training aids within all equine disciplines are found objectionable by the majority of the public, “the practices should be further scrutinized”.
Those words seemed clairvoyant when a video recently surfaced — it went viral just days before the Elliott photo — of showjumper Kevin Lemke repeatedly striking his horse mid-competition, prompting Lemke to issue an apology and the FEI to issue a statement of condemnation.
The Heleski paper with arguably the most cache for racing is one that explores the sport through the lens of its social license to operate, the idea that the court of public opinion ultimately defines the parameters of how horseracing should be conducted.
Unsettling statistics
The paper covers acres of ground, including a number of unsettling statistics. In September of 2019, for example, when the Santa Anita welfare crisis was still a raw wound, a local Fox news affiliate conducted a Facebook poll asking whether the track should be shut down. Some 18,900 people voted, and 54 percent voted yes.
But perhaps most instructive for the industry, the paper breaks down the five common areas of concern among the public: Worries about fatal breakdowns and any overlap with the safety of racetrack surfaces, whip use, drug policies, the life cycle of horses when their careers are done, and concern over the racing of 2-year-olds.
That last factor may startle some in the industry, but just take a peek at the following excerpt from a petition that animal rights organization Direct Action Everywhere has circulated to end racing at Golden Gate Fields:
“Horses are raced as young as 2 years old, even though their bones are still developing until they are 5. Devices like twitches [tongue ties] and stud chains [attached to the halter and going under the upper lip against the gum] are commonly used to get young horses into the starting gate. Horses are drugged to mask pain, hiding smaller injuries that lead to catastrophic injuries during exertion.”
As Heleski puts it, “[There are] far fewer people with an agricultural background than what we had 50 years ago, and that’s going to continue to be a challenge.”
So, how did we get here?
Sentient creatures
Much has been written about how the average American is now some three generations removed from an agrarian lifestyle, with less than one percent of U.S. families engaged in the raising of livestock. This means that scant few children now have any meaningful first-hand exposure to the existential lessons of life and death that precede the stocking of supermarket shelves with the likes of milk, eggs, meat and vegetables.
Coupled with that is the ongoing uptick in pet ownership.
A 2017-2018 American Pet Products Association (APPA) survey found that nearly 70 percent of U.S. households own a pet. This trend doesn’t just translate into big business — in 2018, the U.S. forked out an estimated $72 billion plus on pet expenditures — it shifts perceptions that view pets more as counterparts than subordinates.
The New York Times has reported that 70 percent of pet owners admit to sometimes sleeping with their pets, 65 percent have bought them Christmas gifts, and, in a blow to American husbands, 40 percent of married women said they received greater emotional support from their pets than from their spouses.
That NY Times report is already ten years old. Chances are, those findings are even more pronounced today.
This in turn feeds into our inclination to anthropomorphise animal behaviour. Disney is probably the most familiar antagonist of this — here’s looking at you, Bambi — but contemporary examples abound. At the same time, this is hardly a new phenomenon — ancient civilizations did exactly the same thing.
So, maybe we need turn elsewhere for an explanation behind evolving attitudes. Perhaps it belongs to a growing understanding of animals as sentient beings, a concept that broadly taps into their state of consciousness — their ability to feel and experience pain and emotions.
Animal sentience is an issue hotly debated among university boffins. But in 2012, a prominent group of experts wrote the ‘Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness’, a ground-breaking document that declared how all mammals possess the neuro-pathways necessary for conscious states and the ability to exhibit intentional behaviour.
A rapidly growing database on animal sentience prompted one expert in evolutionary biology to subsequently declare a Universal Declaration on Animal Sentience.
As the science grows, what then for our sport?
Social media
When put on an ethical hotseat, a common and all-too-understandable reaction is to question motive through moral equivalence.
Why, for example, has disciplinary action been metered out by the sport’s regulators to Elliott but not to Sheikh Mohammed, whose wife fled to London allegedly fearing for her life, and who has been accused of kidnapping and imprisoning his daughter? Is one action more morally repugnant than the other?
If, for example, the broader media is genuinely incensed by mistreatment of horses for sport, where are all the column inches devoted to the ongoing problem of match racing in the U.S., an unregulated and illegal activity notorious for prodigious drug use?
All sorts of reasons underlie the elevation of one issue over another. Some of them are matters of timing. Some economic. Some logistical. Some, however, belong to the odd trajectory of the online zeitgeist, where the ease with which information is shared can either fuel or extinguish viral campaigns for inexplicable reasons.
The Eight Belles turning point
But dig deeper, and the seemingly nonsensical can acquire a pattern. What shared commonality links the relative fates that have befallen the Ringling Bros Circus, SeaWorld and greyhound racing? They have all been the focus of sustained campaigns, some decades-long, by animal rights organizations.
In terms of horseracing, an important turning point as to the amount of attention and resources placed on it by animal rights groups appears to be Eight Belles’s fatal injury in the 2008 Kentucky Derby. That was nearly 13 years ago, and the clock keeps ticking.
In the story of Rip Van Winkle, the protagonist is able to return to his idle ways of yore, taking seat at the door of the local inn to share stories of a bygone era, celebrated among the townsfolk as something of an oddity.
Racing isn’t privy to the same unchallenged and cozy fate as old Rip. Nevertheless, as Heleski points out, it still gets to write its own story. Which one, however, will it choose?
“If you think of a bell curve of human attitudes, there’s ten percent at the end of each part of the bell curve where you probably can’t help educate them. But the 80 percent at the center, you can bring them over to one direction or the other,” said Heleski. “It just depends on what type of information you go over with them.”