Eight Belles: Did the Derby contender have to die?

“The Churchill Downs grandstand still was crackling with electricity when the ominous signs of trouble appeared,” said Pat Forde in ESPN.com. Eight Belles, the only filly in the 134th Kentucky Derby last week, had just finished second behind the winner, Big Brown. As the crowd roared, the gunmetal-gray 3-year-old continued to gallop along as she slowed down. Suddenly she buckled and collapsed, throwing off her jockey. Eight Belles had fractured both her front ankles so severely that she couldn’t be taken from the track. Her trainer, Larry Jones, made the only possible decision. “She had no way of being saved,” he said. “She didn’t need to suffer.” As the racetrack crowd and millions of TV viewers watched in horror, Eight Belles was euthanized by injection, apparently the first horse ever to have died at the Kentucky Derby.

There’s no mystery why Eight Belles perished, said Sally Jenkins in The Washington Post. She was killed by an innately cruel sport. And her death was no rarity; experts estimate that there are 1.5 fatal injuries to horses for every 1,000 starts. “That’s an average of two per day.” This appalling figure is the result of decades of breeding thoroughbreds into anatomical freaks, “their heart and lungs oversize knots of tissue placed in a massive chest.” Running at speeds of up to 45 miles per hour, these huge creatures strike the ground with a force of 5,500 pounds per square inch. Yet their half-ton bulk is supported only by “dainty” legs and “champagne-glass ankles.”

One misstep can spell doom. That’s why all the shock and outrage over Eight Belles’ demise seems more than a little naïve, said Wallace Matthews in Newsday. “This is a breed that exists only for one purpose: to run fast. And as long as they do, there will be injuries, there will be breakdowns, there will be death.”

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Not surprisingly, some animal lovers are now renewing calls to ban horse racing, said Jane Smiley in The New York Times. But “it is not racing per se that is cruel.” It’s the way we practice it. In the U.S., horses are raced from a very early age, before their bones can properly develop, on unforgiving dirt tracks. In Europe, where horses compete in longer races at slower speeds and on turf courses, there aren’t nearly as many breakdowns. So let’s make those changes, said Bill Finley in ESPN.com. But while we’re at it, let’s also ban the “steroids, painkillers, and diuretics” that we pump into these beautiful animals, and start breeding them for stamina, not swiftness. It’s time for the industry to step up and demonstrate that horse racing is not “tantamount to animal cruelty.”

“No one is more disturbed or hurt” by Eight Belles’ death than the people who raise and train horses, said breeder Jim Squires in The New York Times. Contrary to what many animal-rights activists may think, most people in the horse business love their animals as much as others love their dogs and cats. Many of them, in fact, are pushing for changes in breeding techniques and track design. But let’s not kid ourselves that we’ll ever make horse racing truly “safe.” That would mean changing the very character of horses. With or without jockeys on their backs, whether wild or domesticated, “horses race with one another and often try so hard they hurt themselves.” Simply put, running hard is in their nature—just as it is in our nature to be awed and captivated by these magnificent creatures’ grace and speed.