I know a little bit about horses.  One of the benefits of being a poor farm kid from Indiana is that I know a little bit about horses.  This is still a sports site, we aren’t dead yet, and with the euthanization of Eight Belles the sport of horse racing is on the pages again.  The problem is that horses die, sometimes in a very public fashion and at rates easily deemed alarming, in Thoroughbred horse racing.   Disclaimer: I am not a veterinarian.   

Can you imagine the world’s reaction if they discovered that Kobe had been put down moments after breaking his ankle on the court?  I don’t expect horses to draw the same reaction that people do.  That is not the case and this is not a post attempting to draw you into an animal rights discussion.  I am not sure where this is going, so let me throw a little knowledge at you.

Horses have very fragile legs.  The reason is due to the way a horse distributes its weight to the ground and the fact that horse anatomy is very different from what most people think.  Horses are large animals.  The weight of their bodies against that of their legs is vastly different from that of other quadrupeds.  It makes them fast, but it also makes their lower leg fragile simply because there is a small amount of bone distributing that weight.  Another factor in horse health directly related to the leg has to do with circulation.  Horses are always standing, they lay down occasionally, but mainly remain on their feet.  This is because a horse needs to bear weight on its legs to maintain proper circulation.  If they don’t have the proper amount of weight on a leg for an extended period of time, blood does not circulate to the leg properly, and infections will take root in the leg that would have otherwise been combated by proper blood flow.  So, if a horse injures a leg, and is favoring it by not putting weight on it, it compounds the problem.  If it injures a leg, and you resolve to aid in the blood flow by encouraging it to stand on the leg, it may effect circulation in other legs.  These things do not always happen, but when they do they become very serious because of the fragility of the lower leg and ankle bones.

            As far as the difference in anatomy is concerned, the structure of a horse’s leg is not at all like ours.  In fact, the anatomy of a horse’s leg from the “knee” down is not like us.  They do not have a “forearm”.  Below a horse knee, the anatomy resembles more of a human anatomy from the wrist down.  The cannon bone is actually a metacarpal, like a in the palms of our hands and the pasterns are like our fingers.  The “ankle” is actually the fetlock, and it is not so much and ankle as it is another digit in a finger.  So a lot of pressure is applied to these bones, particularly at speed, and that adds to their fragility.

            So, what is wrong with these horses?  Well, to give you a short answer, I think breeders are breeding animals larger than their breed characteristics can support and creating a pattern of unsound animals.  What do I mean by that?  Well, Thoroughbreds are streamlined animals being bred for speed.  To streamline them and make them faster they are trying to maximize the amount of muscle and animal can carry.  They are overloading the skeletal structure of the animal.  Thoroughbreds as a breed tend to have small legs and small hoof diameter.  People are attempting to raise larger Thoroughbreds for the same reason Randy Moss runs past double coverage, a longer stride carries you further per stride than a shorter one.  They are making them too big for their feet to adequately support.  Thoroughbred racing (according to Wikipedia) is seeing about 2 fatal injuries for every 1000 horses that start a race.  In California, where the weather allows a longer racing season, they are seeing about 4.

            But that is only part of the reason.  Another big part of the fragility of Thoroughbreds is inbreeding.  This has always been an argument against the Thoroughbred, and it is tough to shout down.  Why is inbreeding bad?  Close inbreeding or repeated inbreeding severely reduces the viability of zygotes by packing the genetic makeup of the fertilized cell with recessive traits.  Two places where this can become a calculable problem for an organism is in the proper development of bone structure and internal organs.  Both of these problems are endemic to Thoroughbreds.  Thoroughbreds often have improperly formed hearts and lungs and have fragile bones or asymmetric bones.

            Inbreeding is widely embraced by the Thoroughbred breeders because of the financial gain to be had from producing a winner.  If a breeder wants fast horses, he breeds his broodmares to fast stallions with a record of producing winners.  If he gets a winner, that doesn’t necessarily mean that the winner will make a good stud of winners.  Often this is far from the case.  A stud with a good track record will always find people willing to pay the stud fee, and since he can stand stud for several years, he has the ability to impose his genetics of several generations.  Often he will find himself being applied to his own progeny. 

            To name drop and bring this a little closer to home for you, let me mention Storm Cat.  Storm Cat is widely considered one of the top Thoroughbred stud in the world.  In 2007, if your mare gave birth to a live foal sired by Storm Cat, you owed Overbrook Farm a half a million.  If I could collect that kind of bank for working my magic, I would be well on my way to building a laser capable of writing “Fuck the Patriots” on the moon.  Anyway, Storm Cat has sired over 300 graded and stakes winners.  A mediocre racer himself, Storm Cat has made a name for siring winners and, maybe more importantly, siring great studs.   To name a few would bring heavyweight stud names like Hennessey, Tabassco Cat (who had a shot at the Triple Crown if he hadn’t been bumped coming out of the gates), and Giant’s Causeway.  A slightly more recent name in terms of studs producing winners would be Mr. Prospector.  Mr. Prospector’s winners read like Yankee Hall of Famers.  His descendents include Real Quiet, Red Bullet, Hansel, Grindstone, Thunder Gulch, Point Given, Afleet Alex, Smarty Jones, Funncy Cide, Street Sense, Barbaro, War Emblem, Curlin, Big Brown, Eight Belles, and Fusaichi Pegasus.  This guy sneezes Triple Crown winners.  Most of those horses will stand stud at some point, and will eventually encounter Mr. Prospector’s genetics down the road.  This isn’t a new occurrence.  If you look at the pedigrees of many Throughbreds you are going to see names like Native Dancer, Northern Dancer, Secretariat (THE most dominant athlete of all time), Danzig, Bold Ruler, Nashua, or Nearco.  Many of your better winners will not have the same name on the dam side and the sire side, but some will.  The lack of frequency on those winners may account for their soundness, it may not.  In many cases, though, you will be finding the same names on either side of the pedigree, particularly the maternal side.  Good sires will effect horseracing for generations.  Bold Ruler created a lot of good, winning stallions that made good studs.  Secretariat is among them.  Big Red himself was known as a great broodmare sire, and his daughters cranked out a lot of winners.  Breeders who want to avoid inbreeding have to be careful and responsible.  It is easier for the big farms who keep lots of quality studs.  Smaller farms have to take more risks to keep producing good racehorses.  A well bred animal is generally more sound than an inbred animal.  Still, if you have ever had dogs you know that mutts tend to live the longest, and the top racehorse prospects tend to be closely related.  After a generation or two that will become problematic.  In a grand punctuation of my point, it is rumored that Giant's Causeway will stand to Rags to Riches, the 2007 filly who smote Curlin in the Belmont Stakes, her first start against males.  Both horses, GC and Rags, have Secretariat, Blushing Groom, and Nasrullah in their pedigrees, and from different angles I believe.  

            In the end, let me say this: horse people are freaking nuts.  They are freaking nuts.  Rich people with horses are nutty and poor people with horses are nutty.  Having a horse is an expense in its own right, but when you are talking about hundreds of millions of dollars worth of investment, which is what you are talking about with some of these stud farms, you are going to find some nutty ass folks who apply weird value to odd things.  If the high profile cases of Barbaro and Eight Belles have opened your eyes a deeper inspection of Thoroughbreds will bring even more to light.  For every Barbaro blowing a canon in the Triple Crown there are three or four horses that break down that day you don’t even know about.  For every Eight Belles that has to be put down after a bad break on raceday there are a half dozen that get put down for laminitis a week after.  The only numbers that will scare you more than the numbers of euthanized Thoroughbreds in racing are the numbers that people shell out to breed them into fragility.           

8 Comments

Leave a comment