Anyone involved in Thoroughbred racing will recall the equine fatalities at the winter Santa Anita meeting from December 2018 through March 2019. Twenty-three horses died there during racing in what was a major national news story that threatened the existence of Thoroughbred racing as a viable industry.
PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) campaigned aggressively about it, along with other animal rights organizations that had members protesting strongly against the continuation of the sport in California. As recently as May, 2021, The New Yorker ran a long article entitled Can Horse Racing Survive? In a time of changing sensitivities, an ancient sport struggles to justify itself.
This CHRB (California Horse Racing Board) report was published in March 2020. Then Executive to the report, “The CHRB views the issuance of this report not as the completion of a project but rather a component of its ongoing and continual commitment to improve racing for the good of the horse and rider.”
There are some important management and technology developments that have been implemented in the last 12 months that demonstrate significant improvements in racing and equine safety.
This is a 77-page document and I encourage you to review it. Below are my personal selections from the Key Findings section:
- 19 of the 22 catastrophic musculoskeletal injuries (CMI) had proximal sesamoid bone fractures, which have been related to racing and training intensity.
- The overwhelming majority of the CMI (21 of 22 cases) in this cluster involved the fetlock joint (metacarpophalangeal/metatarsophalangeal).
- The majority of CMI cases (14 of 22) exhibited a high-intensity exercise profile followed by a decline in activity in the month prior to CMI.
- The data suggests that 39 percent of the fatalities occurred on surfaces affected by wet weather.
- Prior to the fatality review, the majority of horsemen had not previously reviewed the necropsy reports on their horses; furthermore, many did not display good working knowledge of anatomy or grasp the significance of major pre-existing lesions - e.g. Palmar/Plantar Osteochondral Disease (POD) lesions.
- Organizationally the track veterinarian and examining veterinarians being supervised by the racing association’s racing office poses an inherent conflict.
- 16 horses were under the care of trainers with at least one other fatality within a 12-month period.
Racing summary (a small portion of the complete summary)
Santa Anita management had made it known that both the number of races and the number of runners per race needed to increase in order to improve business. Several trainers said they felt pressured to race. However, only one gave a specific example.
The study indicates a correlation between fatalities and surfaces that have been affected both by heavy rains and the extraordinary procedures needed to maintain them for racing and training.
The presence of pre-existing pathology, coupled with aggressive veterinary treatments described herein, may have resulted in horses that were physically compromised running on compromised surfaces, resulting in an extraordinary number of fatalities.
Finally, given the apparent correlation between wet weather, sealed tracks and fatalities, Santa Anita management should continue to consider replacing the dirt track with a synthetic surface, which does not need to be sealed.
A second report was prepared by the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office in December 2019. Click here to see this 17-page document, which has some interesting reporting.
Reading the reporting from the local and national print and electronic media as the equine fatalities occurred, I was under the impression that the deaths at Santa Anita in this 2018-2019 period were unprecedented in their volume. However, that was not the case. Here is the fatality data from the Attorney General report:
“The California racing industry compiles equine fatality statistics based on the fiscal year. Forty-four deaths occurred at Santa Anita Park during the 2017-2018 fiscal year. Thirty-seven occurred during racing or training and seven were due to illness or non-racing accidents. This was one of the lowest numbers in recent history, with the 49 fatalities during fiscal year 2018-2019 being the second lowest.”
What this strongly suggests to me and would apply to all major racing jurisdictions is that the industry cannot and should not tolerate the higher level of equine fatalities that has existed in the past.
1. Two additional statistics that jumped out at me from the Los Angeles AG reporting for the racing/training at Santa Anita from July 2018 to November 2019 are:
Three months (January 2019 - 13 fatalities, February 2019 - 8 fatalities, March 2019 - 5 fatalities) were the highest number of monthly deaths for the period. They were also the months that had the highest rainfall during this period.
2. Comparing racing with training fatalities, the totals are consistently about equal. Based on my experience in New York, I would have thought that the racing day fatalities should be higher. However, it may be that there are substantially more training days than race days in California.
Belinda Stronach’s open letter
While the LA District Attorney report is substantially shorter than the CHRB report, it has a substantive section on Recommended Best Practices which is worth your time. You will find them on page 14.
Finally, on March 14, 2019, in the middle of a shutdown of racing at Santa Anita, the Stronach Group Chairman and President, Belinda Stronach, whose family owns and operates Santa Anita as well as a portfolio of U.S., racetracks distributed this open letter on The Future of Thoroughbred Racing in California.
Here is an excerpt from the letter:
“This mandate encompasses a complete revision of the current medication policy to improve the safety of our equine and human athletes and to raise the integrity of our sport.
The revisions comprise best practices currently at racetracks around the world:
- Banning the use of Lasix.
- Increasing the ban on legal therapeutic NSAIDS, joint injections, shockwave therapy, and anabolic steroids.
- Complete transparency of all veterinary records.
- Significantly increasing out-of-competition testing.
- A substantial investment by the Stronach Group in diagnostic equipment to aid in the early detection of pre-existing conditions.
- Horses in training are only allowed therapeutic medication with a qualified veterinary diagnosis.”
It is important to note that the diagnostic equipment referred to was installed on December 12, 2019, at Santa Anita. This was the world’s first MILE-PET device, a positron emission tomography (PET) scanner specifically designed to image standing racehorses. This installation, one of several measures to reduce breakdowns at the racetrack, received a lot of attention at a time when Santa Anita was just coming out of a challenging racing season, with a cluster of horse fatalities early in the year.
PET scanner a ‘game-changer’
The following content was published in two articles in UC Davis Veterinary Medicine, one written by Amy Young and published on June 9, 2021, and the other by Rob Warren on June 11, 2021.
“In a year and a half since the installation, over 200 horses have been imaged with the scanner, several on multiple occasions. The PET scanner is ideal for imaging the fetlock (the horse’s ankle), which is the most common site for catastrophic injuries in racehorses. The first research study performed at Santa Anita demonstrated that PET was far superior to bone scan, another imaging technique in use at the racetrack, for identifying injuries in the sesamoid bones (the small bones at the back of the ankle).
“Due to the great success with the PET scanner, the UC Davis standing equine PET scanner is officially in use at Golden Gate Fields racetrack in Berkeley, California, providing imaging at the molecular level to monitor racehorse health and guide training and medical care.
“The scanner (the MILEPET from LONGMILE Veterinary Imaging) allows for imaging of a horse’s leg while under mild sedation, eliminating the time, cost and health risks associated with general anesthesia. This achievement was made possible thanks to support from the UC Davis Center for Equine Health and the Stronach Group, owners of the Golden Gate Fields racetrack. Both parties have been intimately involved with the development of equine PET.
“The Stronach Group has had a key role in the last two years by providing partial support to develop the first scanner allowing imaging of standing horses in an effort to prevent catastrophic breakdown in racehorses.
“Two subsequent studies demonstrated the value of PET to monitor injuries while healing and joint health as horses go back into training.”
The PET scanner is clearly a game-changer in reducing horse racing/training fatalities at the racetrack.
Finally, it is very early with a small sample size but the reduction in fatalities at Santa Anita racetrack from CHRB fiscal year July 1, 2018, to June 30, 2019, as compared to fiscal year July 1, 2019, to June 30, 2020, is encouraging.
Santa Anita fatalities
‘Racing’ includes any fatality associated with racing. ‘Training’ includes any fatality associated with training. ‘Other’ includes any non-exercise fatality. The most common cause of ‘other’ deaths is gastro-intestinal diseases, followed by respiratory diseases and neurological diseases.
One year does not indicate a real trend, but a 50 percent reduction in equine fatalities in one year is a good start.
Clearly, there has been some excellent work over this past year in California by Alan Balch, the Executive Director of the California Thoroughbred Trainers (CTT), Scott Chaney, Executive Director of the CHRB, and Greg Ferraro, chair of the CHRB and their members and constituents.
In advance of the CHRB meeting on October 20, and a Medication, Safety and Welfare Committee on October 19, Balch had two CTT board meetings and a statewide teleconference attended by more than 100 licensed trainers in the state. On the teleconference committee call on the 19th, Balch made a proposal to create an accident prevention task force involving “each of the independent constituencies” engaged in racing. In addition, he made the CTT available to lead the initiative or participate in it.
Chairman Ferraro, who also chairs the Committee, provided the following summary of that meeting:
“I was pleased to see that they came forward during the meeting [with] a very progressive set of proposals that really made a lot of sense and ended up being quite productive. Their proposal includes about ten different elements to it to improve our safety, but the main ingredient, which everyone seems to be in favor of, was to develop an accident prevention task force, which would unite all the different elements of racing participants around the table and work towards developing regulations and procedures to further decrease our injury rate.
“This will include involvement of all elements of racing: Trainers, owners, racetrack management, CHRB, in order to prevent further injuries. The discussion was quite productive.”
This exchange and others in advance of and during the meeting convinced me that the leaders of the various racing industry constituencies in California fully understand that they need to work together to solve the industry’s serious equine fatality problem. Clearly, the California racing industry learned an important lesson during the winter of 2019 at Santa Anita.
With an active mainstream media, extensive social media networks and a strong and growing animal rights movement, if the Thoroughbred industry does not properly address our equine fatalities, we could follow dog racing and the elephants at the circus right off the world stage.