The Dangers of Horse Racing
Horse racing is a sport rooted in centuries of tradition and evolved into a spectacle that involves enormous fields of runners, sophisticated electronic monitoring equipment and immense sums of money. But its basic concept remains unchanged from the earliest times: two competitors, catapulted by pedigree and ambition, race against each other. The one that finishes first is the winner.
In the wild, horses love to run, and running fast comes naturally to them, but winning a race is a human construct that requires training that includes whipping to encourage them to continue pushing themselves even when they are exhausted. Injuries are common, and the euthanasia rate is high. Thousands of young horses in peak physical condition are killed each year.
For the most part, racehorses are drugged to mask injuries and enhance performance, and many suffer from a serious condition called exercise-induced pulmonary hemorrhage that causes them to bleed from their lungs during races. A cocktail of legal and illegal drugs, including painkillers, antipsychotics, diuretics and blood thinners, is used to treat the bleeding. Several studies have found that as a result, many horses are forced to race while seriously injured.
The drugs, along with harsh training methods and inadequate safety measures, contribute to a deadly culture in which a great number of horses are injured or die during racing. Those who do survive are then often sold in auctions, known as “claiming races,” where owners can callously buy and sell them to anyone who wants them, limiting their chances of finding good homes. During a two-month period in 2011, over 2,000 horses were callously sold through claiming races.
It’s also not a good sport for the jockeys, who are exposed to the same dangers as the horses and can suffer from the same injuries. It’s estimated that three thoroughbreds per day in North America die during races because of catastrophic injuries, and that’s just the tip of the iceberg. The horse racing industry is structured systematically around animal abuse, and repeated attempts to reform it have had little effect.
The same can be said of politics, where the term “horse race journalism” has been bandied about for a style of reporting that treats minor updates in polling data and campaign strategy like play-by-play announcer calls. Newsrooms need to provide more context than just probabilistic forecasting if they want to serve the public well. That means examining the material costs of elections as well as the financial, psychological and ethical costs for all involved. This is particularly important for newspapers that are owned by large chains, a group of researchers has concluded. They looked at articles published in print newspapers in 2004 and 2006. Their results suggest that a greater emphasis on probabilistic forecasting gives corporate-owned papers an advantage over small, independent, and locally owned ones. This effect is most pronounced when a close election is in the works. The research was published in the journal Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly.
Horse racing is a sport rooted in centuries of tradition and evolved into a spectacle that involves enormous fields of runners, sophisticated electronic monitoring equipment and immense sums of money. But its basic concept remains unchanged from the earliest times: two competitors, catapulted by pedigree and ambition, race against each other. The one that finishes first is the winner. In the wild, horses love to run, and running fast comes naturally to them, but winning a race is a human construct that requires training that includes whipping to encourage them to continue pushing themselves even when they are exhausted. Injuries are common, and the euthanasia rate is high. Thousands of young horses in peak physical condition are killed each year. For the most part, racehorses are drugged to mask injuries and enhance performance, and many suffer from a serious condition called exercise-induced pulmonary hemorrhage that causes them to bleed from their lungs during races. A cocktail of legal and illegal drugs, including painkillers, antipsychotics, diuretics and blood thinners, is used to treat the bleeding. Several studies have found that as a result, many horses are forced to race while seriously injured. The drugs, along with harsh training methods and inadequate safety measures, contribute to a deadly culture in which a great number of horses are injured or die during racing. Those who do survive are then often sold in auctions, known as “claiming races,” where owners can callously buy and sell them to anyone who wants them, limiting their chances of finding good homes. During a two-month period in 2011, over 2,000 horses were callously sold through claiming races. It’s also not a good sport for the jockeys, who are exposed to the same dangers as the horses and can suffer from the same injuries. It’s estimated that three thoroughbreds per day in North America die during races because of catastrophic injuries, and that’s just the tip of the iceberg. The horse racing industry is structured systematically around animal abuse, and repeated attempts to reform it have had little effect. The same can be said of politics, where the term “horse race journalism” has been bandied about for a style of reporting that treats minor updates in polling data and campaign strategy like play-by-play announcer calls. Newsrooms need to provide more context than just probabilistic forecasting if they want to serve the public well. That means examining the material costs of elections as well as the financial, psychological and ethical costs for all involved. This is particularly important for newspapers that are owned by large chains, a group of researchers has concluded. They looked at articles published in print newspapers in 2004 and 2006. Their results suggest that a greater emphasis on probabilistic forecasting gives corporate-owned papers an advantage over small, independent, and locally owned ones. This effect is most pronounced when a close election is in the works. The research was published in the journal Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly.