Lots of stuff going on lately - Dad’s in the hospital, the kids’s getting ready to graduate from high school - so blogging has sort of become the odd-activity-out. We’re live from the press box of York’s Sovereign Bank Stadium before the Barnstormers’ game, with tons of observational-type material stored in the hump….
We tape The Low Post on Tuesdays, and it usually isn’t up on Lancasteronline.com until Wednesday afternoon. Sometimes stuff happens in the interim that makes what we’ve said look a little silly. Which is another way of saying that when were talking about Barry Bonds not getting picked up by anybody, no, we weren’t figuring additional indictments into the equation….
The sum of my knowledge of and interest in horse racing could be expressed on the lip of a beer bottle with a wide-tip pen, but the fallout from Eight Belles’ death has been weirdly fascinating. The reaction from PETA and the like was predictable, but so was the defensive beligerence of the horse-racing industry. You tend to sympathize with rank-and-file racing people because, if you’ve ever been around them, you know their love for horses is deep and genuine.
But it’s hard to sympathize with their argument, at least what I’ve seen of it, because it almost isn’t an argument. It starts with “shut up critics,” and then acknowledges that, yeah, the critics have a good point. Consider this from the best journalist I know of working this beat, the Washington Post’s Andrew Beyer:
“One major reason for the fragility of American thoroughbreds is breeders’ obsession with speed; they don’t care about durability when they produce a racehorse. This is a seemingly insoluble problem because nobody can legislate the private decisions of breeders…
American horses are much less durable than they used to be, and they are less durable than their counterparts in other countries. So what makes contemporary U.S. racing different? We all know the one-word answer to that question: drugs.
In the 1970s, American racing adopted the policy of “permissive medication,” legalizing drugs that are banned in the rest of the racing world. The administration of the diuretic Lasix and the painkiller Butazolidin became standard at every U.S. racetrack. Other commonly used drugs — such as corticosteroids injected in the joints of ailing animals — allow them to run without pain and surely contribute to breakdowns. The use of anabolic steroids puts extra muscle on horses, forcing their bones to carry more weight and absorb more of an impact when they hit the ground.
American racing is addicted to drugs, and American horses will never again be fueled by hay, oats and water alone. But until the industry faces the medication issue seriously, all of its efforts to address equine safety will be misguided.”
To summarize, then: We breed horses to be fragile, and when they break down we drug them, endangering their health in the long term and maybe in the short term. But we know horses and you don’t, leave us alone.
Charming….
Had a brief one-on-one talk with Donovan McNabb Tuesday. Was amazed at how interested and even knowledgeable he seemed about Pennsylvania high school football. Knew all about Berwick and Manheim Central. He even remembered Corey Jones (Darryl Daniel, the number two receiver behind Jones at Conestoga Valley High in the early 1990s, was McNabb’s teammate and roommate at Syracuse). It was like he was interviewing me there for a minute…
I don’t care how old he is, they’ve got to bring a lot more than dehydration to slow down JoePa for long.
