The Victims of the Horse Racing Industry

      Every year thousands of horses are born around the world. Many are unwanted and eventually killed, neglected, or abused. The biggest culprit to the overpopulation, and in turn 'unwanted neglected horses' is the thoroughbred horse racing industry. The industry breeds their horses until they have a 'cash winner', and then they run that horse until it is basically broken where they then use the horse for breeding until it's blood line can no longer produce winners. According to a study published in the Journal of Animal Science in December 2010, "More than 100,000 unwanted horses are born in the United States per year. ...Despite this, the racing industry continues to churn out nearly 30,000 thoroughbred foals each year" (Masahiro Satoh, Volume 81, Issue 6). In other words, one third of the 'unwanted' horses born every year is due to the horse racing industry.
 
      For decades, the thoroughbred industry has used a sickening breeding method that only recently has been brought forth. This is how the breeding works: Prized thoroughbred mares are pushed to their biological limits when they are forced to reproduce once a year in order to create as many potential racehorse champions as possible. A horses gestation period is about 11-12 months, meaning breeders have the mares re-impregnated right after giving birth to maximize the productivity, which stops them from nursing their own babies. The newborns are taken away from their mothers within days of delivery, and nursed by surrogate mothers (of 'inferior' breeds such as quarter horses or thoroughbreds with a less desirable pedigree) who have just given birth to their own baby. The babies of these surrogate mothers are know as nurse mare foals and they are often referred as "junk," and "the unwanted and forgotten by-products; simply waste for disposal," according to an article, "Milk of Death: the Dark side of the Nurse Mare Industry," written by Jane Allin. It's not ok that a greedy industry that is just in the business to make money is able to take these babies away from their mothers just after they are born so they can make room for the more 'valuable babies.'

      While separating thoroughbred babies from their mothers is tragic enough, most nurse mare foals face a worse fate than the race horse foals. Many foals (as young as a day old) are killed by clubbing or other means, some are starved to death and others are sold to industries for their hides also known as “pony skin”. Since it is illegal to send foals under six months to slaughter, they skin then to produce high-end leather products such as handbags and belts. Some of the lucky foals are rescued by horse advocacy groups, where they are bottled fed and cared for until they can be adopted.

      In his blog about the Nightmare of the Nurse Mare Foals, Mat Thomas states, "Rescuers nourish nurse mare foals by bottle-feeding them milk replacer, which could theoretically be used to feed thoroughbred foals as well, thus eliminating this exceedingly inhumane breeding practice altogether. There are two main reasons that they don't do this: formula is expensive, and horse breeders maintain that thoroughbreds need to drink real (albeit surrogate) mother's milk from the source to achieve peak athletic performance. Plus, the larger nurse mare farms (concentrated in New York, Kentucky and Tennessee) produce 50 to 100 foals a year, and it is more operationally efficient to make the surrogate mothers do all the work rather than paying human caretakers to feed the foals by hand." Although I accept that thoroughbred foals should be fed formula milk to stop the use of surrogate mothers and the overpopulation of horses, I still insist that the horse racing industry should not breed their horses every year. Race horse owners should stop seeing their horses as 'just a value of money' and see them as a living creature. If the industry keeps on breeding and racing horses the way they do the thoroughbred breed will have many, many health problems down the road.



Nursing Mother Foals

Thoroughbred foal and surrogate mother

Sources:
Horse Racing: Breeding by the Numbers
Milk of Death: The Dark Side the Nurse Mare Industry
BlogSpot: AnimalRighter
PETA: Excessive Breeding and Overpopulation