Saturday May 3, 2008, 3:33 pm
This is so sad....she went out in a blaze of glory. I sat and cried while watching.....

Saturday May 3, 2008, 3:43 pm
Will someone please stop this sh*t!! First Barbaro and now Eight Belles. This is abuse/tortore of animals and because the filthy rich are involved, nothing will ever be done. Money, money, money and damn the animals!

Saturday May 3, 2008, 3:57 pm
I was out today and didn't hear about this until just now - I am so very very sad and so very very VERY angry! Yes, it's all about money, expoitatation and animal abuse. This must be stopped.

Saturday May 3, 2008, 4:07 pm
I never watch this sport, but was home & just thought I would rout for the the only filly. The result reinforced why I never liked it. No animal should have to die for so-called entertainment. I lit an online candle for her.

Saturday May 3, 2008, 4:58 pm
Another tragic, horrible, unjustifiable waste of a beautiful life. I'm sad and angry too... our exploitation and domination of other species is unconscionable.

I agree wholeheartedly with this eloquent blog essay about this very subject.

RIP, Eight Belles. I'm sorry your life was never your own, and that it ended so early and so needlessly.

Saturday May 3, 2008, 5:09 pm
Excellent blog essay, Laurie. Thank you for alerting us to it.

Saturday May 3, 2008, 5:14 pm
Horse racing is bad enough, but when will they stop putting the animals down for a simple broken leg?! Surely after giving her all for our 'entertainment', she at least deserved to be retired instead. Oh, yeah, as you said - that would cost money!

Saturday May 3, 2008, 5:26 pm
Thing is this is due to stress fractures if youu ask me...To many races with not enough rest between...I used to gallop racehorses..It so breaks my heart...Big Goriolly Hugs...

Saturday May 3, 2008, 7:59 pm
Linda leg injuries are the worst...And she broke BOTH front ankels....There is no Vet in the country that can heal such wounds...You would have to keep a horse in slings for far to long and that would just make the matters worse. I so wish it wasnt true, but horses weight too much and cannot place too much weight on even one break especially two breaks too soon or too long. And most racehorses are started way too young, before their bones are solid, some are started with knees that are not closed up and this causes breakdowns and broke legs...It does have to stop....I do beleive..

Big Gorilly Hugs

Sunday May 4, 2008, 12:19 am
Its a wonder anyone calls us a "civilized" society. All this promotes is animal abuse (worst of all) not to mention gambling addiction and being irresponsible with money.

Sunday May 4, 2008, 8:00 am
Stephanie's right, Linda, she wouldn't be able to recover from that injury, it was just too severe with both legs broken, front legs are worst as a horse takes most of its weight on them. Under those circumstances, euthanasia was the only option - the thing is, it ought never to have happened in the first place. That's every bit as bad as our dreadful Grand National in the UK. Just awful. Horses exploited for money.
And what doesn't make the news is the hundreds who don't make the grade and end up being sold off for meat or simply put down at their breeding yards as they aren't 'good enough' for the racing industry. It's a d*mned disgrace.

Sunday May 4, 2008, 9:38 am
Race Horse Death Watch

Animal Aid's Race Horse Death Watch was launched during the 2007 Cheltenham Festival. Its purpose is to expose and record every on-course Thoroughbred fatality in Britain.

The horse racing authorities have resolutely failed to put horse death information into the public domain, preferring to dismiss equine fatalities as ‘accidental’ and ‘unexplained’. Even when several horses die at a single meeting, the term ‘statistical blip’ is often deployed.

Animal Aid has produced a series of revealing reports over the last seven years exposing the welfare problems associated with Thoroughbred breeding, racing, training and disposal of commercially ‘unproductive’ horses. Our research indicates that around 420 horses are raced to death every year. About 38 per cent die on racecourses, while the others are destroyed as a result of training injuries, or are killed because they are no longer commercially viable.

http://www.horsedeathwatch.com/index.php

Sunday May 4, 2008, 9:52 am
Is Horse Racing Breeding Itself to Death?

By Sally Jenkins
Sunday, May 4, 2008; D01

The camera cut away from her, but it should have stayed on her. Eight Belles had run herself half to death yesterday, and now the vets were finishing the job as she lay on her side, her beautiful figure a black hump on the track. Horses don't just fall down like that, you thought as NBC flitted away, cowardlike, from the sickening picture to the more appealing image of the Kentucky Derby victor, Big Brown.

There is no turning away from this fact: Eight Belles killed herself finishing second. She ran with the heart of a locomotive, on champagne-glass ankles for the pleasure of the crowd, the sheiks, oilmen, entrepreneurs, old money from the thousand-acre farms, the handicappers, men in bad sport coats with crumpled sheets full of betting hieroglyphics, the julep-swillers and the ladies in hats the size of boats, and the rest of the people who make up thoroughbred racing. There was no mistaking this fact, too, as she made her stretch run, and the apologists will use it to defend the sport in the coming days: She ran to please herself.

But thoroughbred racing is in a moral crisis, and everyone now knows it. Twice since 2006, magnificent animals have suffered catastrophic injuries on live television in Triple Crown races, and there is no explaining that away. Horses are being over-bred and over-raced, until their bodies cannot support their own ambitions, or those of the humans who race them. Barbaro and Eight Belles merely are the most famous horses who have fatally injured themselves. On Friday, a colt named Chelokee, trained by Barbaro's trainer Michael Matz, dislocated an ankle during an undercard for the Kentucky Oaks and was given a 50 percent chance of survival.

According to several estimates, there are 1.5 career-ending breakdowns for every 1,000 racing starts in the United States. That's an average of two per day.

Eight Belles collapsed after crossing the finish line, her front ankles broken so severely she could not be taken from the track. "She didn't have a front leg to stand on to be splinted and hauled off in the ambulance, so she was euthanized," said Larry Bramlage, the Derby's veterinarian.

Make no mistake, most of the people in thoroughbred racing love the animals and want them to be healthy. The Keeneland Association hosted a summit on the "Welfare and Safety of the Racehorse" after Barbaro's breakdown, to urgently consider how to better protect the horses. Synthetic surfaces are one result of the soul-searching.

But the problem is more complex than just surface; it's pervasive in the sport. Modern thoroughbreds are bred for extreme speed, maybe to the point of endangerment. Thoroughbreds are muscularly more powerful than ever, but their bone skeletons seem to be getting lighter and frail. A Kentucky Derby horse has to run a mile and a quarter on a dirt track around two turns by the age of 3. It is the horse equivalent of asking a college kid to play in the Super Bowl. A racehorse therefore has to be bred for many things at once: strength, speed, size and stamina, and it has to be fast maturing, as well.

Thoroughbred breeding is like trying to make four dials all stop on the same number. How to mate the right stallion to the right mare so as to produce a perfectly weighted, formed, balanced animal? Too often, the makeup of a horse isn't right. If it's fast, it's not strong enough, or if it's strong, it lacks stamina. Its chest is too big, or its legs are crooked.

Maybe the trouble starts when people try to take the gambling out of gambling. Breeders try to eliminate the unpredictable from the bloodlines -- the weak or the ordinary or the unknown. Maybe they are trying to breed too perfectly, down to the smallest technicality in pedigree. Pedigree is just another way to reduce the dauntingly long odds. As if you can beat luck with a checkbook.

"See, here's the deal," Nick Zito said once. "The horse don't know what it costs. He doesn't know. Owners put the price on horses, okay?"

Part of the trouble is the makeup of thoroughbreds themselves: They are creatures physically at war with their own nature. The heart and lungs are oversize knots of tissue placed in a massive chest, and huge amounts of blood course through legs that are dainty. Anyone who has spent time around a barn understands that horses love to run. They do it for fun. A few years ago, I stood in a field of yearlings in Ocala, Fla., and watched them tear around in circles like children in a playground.

They need to be given the bodies to accommodate their hearts.

"It's not always the horse with the most class you remember," trainer Allen Jerkens once said. "It's the ones who tried hardest all the time even though they weren't great horses."

It's unfortunate that NBC chose to shy away from the breakdown of Eight Belles, because we need a hard look at the real cost to the horses, no matter how upsetting and painful it is to see.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/05/03/AR2008050301707_pf.html

Monday May 5, 2008, 2:19 am
betbetbetbetbetbetbetbetbet...........

Tuesday May 6, 2008, 1:50 pm
"Eight Belles" Should Sound the End of Racetrack Betting: http://getactive.peta.org/campaign/eight_belles