A Derby To Save The Horses

Not all you see at the Derby today will be pretty.

(That was written before the race, sorry this was so on the mark.)

In training for the races, many horses are crippled and are destroyed. Racing horses are picked for speed, not endurance, and their legs are flimsy. when they put themselves all out to make their owners money, a misstep can be fatal.

The death of Barbaro, who won the Derby, was followed by everyone, his breakdown at Pimlico and the immense effort to save him. Most deaths are not noticed.

The 20 horses competing in today's Kentucky Derby have spent the week being primped and pampered in their Churchill Downs stable digs, cameras fixed on every move, handlers mindful of every step they take: they are royalty on four legs.

If history is any guide, though, some Derby bluebloods will end up one day far away from the bright lights, in the cold, cruel surroundings of a slaughterhouse.

Take Ferdinand. The striking, well-bred son of Canadian-bred Nijinsky II won the Kentucky Derby in 1986 and his future seemed secure. He died in a slaughterhouse in Japan 16 years later, reportedly no longer attractive to breeders as a stallion.

Exceller, the only horse ever to beat two Triple Crown winners – Seattle Slew and Affirmed in the 1978 Jockey Club Gold Cup – died in a Swedish slaughterhouse in 1997. Phantom on Tour, sixth in the '97 Kentucky Derby, might have met a similar fate if rescue groups hadn't have stepped in.

It almost happened to Little Cliff, too. A Derby hopeful two years ago for owner Robert LaPenta and two-time Derby-winning trainer Nick Zito, who have Cool Coal Man in today's race, Little Cliff never panned out as a top horse and eventually slid down to the lower claiming ranks, changing hands several times. Despite a notation on his registration papers that he be returned to Zito after his final race, Little Cliff fell off the map – until April 7, when a thoroughbred rescue group member found him in a direct-to-kill waiting pen at the New Holland livestock auction in Pennsylvania.

The destination for Little Cliff's remains was Canada, where more and more horses are being butchered each day. With no more remaining slaughterhouses in the United States, Mexico is the only other country slaughtering American horses. According to the Canadian Food Inspection Agency, seven licensed plants slaughter horses here. A spokesman at Cookstown Stockyards, an auction house north of Toronto, said that of about a dozen horses that may go through its sale a week, more than 30 per cent are typically racehorses.The appetite appears to be growing. Statistics Canada reports that in 2007, almost $70 million worth of horsemeat was shipped from Canada to countries such as France, Japan and Switzerland, an increase of 20 per cent over 2006. Numerous Toronto restaurants offer horsemeat on the menu – from horses raised like cattle in Quebec. At least one butcher shop located five minutes from Woodbine sells horsemeat imported from Calgary.

The horses arrive at the slaughterhouses through numerous auction/stockyard facilities, including several in Ontario that sell the occasional unwanted racehorse by the pound. The conditions in the vans transporting the horses are often atrocious: low-ceilinged and overcrowded. Veterinarians working with the CFIA inspect all horses delivered to slaughterhouses both before and after their deaths.

Many organizations are working to save horses, including the Humane Society of America, one of my favorites. Some are devoted only to horses.

In Texas, where laws have been adopted to save horses from the slaughterhouses here, the fight is in Congress and the courts, and the owners of the slaughterhouses have enough influence to keep them going by legal maneuvers.

The glamor of horseracing isn't always what the horses experience. At least all those fancy hats aren't made out of horsehair. We hope.

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Oh, no, Eight Bells is down. There is too much breeding flimsy horses and pushing them too hard.