Horse safety matters, everywhere

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How tidy is your house? In the past week I have discussed steeplechase horse safety with reporters from The Baltimore Sun (before Eight Belles) and the Wilmington News-Journal (after). Both wanted to know how safe, or unsafe, steeplechase racing was.

I answered the questions, but I’m not sure I provided much in the way of answers because any discussion on the topic breeds more questions.

Equine sports are inherently dangerous due to simple physics – a large object at great speed tends to make a mess when something goes wrong. Mix in leaving the ground, as horses do in steeplechasing and eventing, and the potential for calamity increases. Eventing has been handed more than its share of accidents and accompanying publicity (The New York Times, anyone?) lately and the sport responded by scheduling a safety summit next month in Kentucky. Major changes could come. Flat racing dances on a bigger stage than any other horse sport, so disasters like the Eight Belles breakdown spawn public outcries for radical changes. Most of the noise is just that, radical, though clearly equine safety must become a bigger priority – if only to defuse the radicals.

Steeplechasing flies under the radar to a degree (we’re small), but will feel the effects of problems in other disciplines and should not be blind to those problems. Nashville newspapers and television stations were working on horse-safety stories in advance of the Iroquois. That News-Journal reporter was sent to Winterthur with the specific assignment of asking horse people about the Derby incident – she wasn’t actually covering the races. A Sun reader called the paper’s upper management about steeplechasing after seeing Earmark break his leg at the Grand National.

Both writers wanted cold, hard data and I didn’t have it. Though good work is being done, data on falls, injury rates and fatalities is difficult to find. Virginia Tech’s Marion du Pont Scott Equine Medical Center collects information from veterinarians at NSA meets and point-to-points in hopes of quantifying the situation. Several years have gone into the study, but the numbers don’t quite reach the finish line. Somewhere in the neighborhood of two-thirds of NSA meets are included in the study through 2007. This year the goal is 100-percent participation, yet some spring meets have not submitted data. The study asks official veterinarians to list injuries and other incidents at the meet and send it in via fax. The information gets used quantitatively, meaning horses’ names and trainers’ names don’t come into play. It’s just a raw accumulation of numbers and should – someday – include all NSA races so the sport can say that from X starts made by Thoroughbreds racing over jumps, XY resulted in falls and Y resulted in injuries. No matter what, those won’t be numbers to be proud of but they will give people (maybe even me) something to lean on when talking to reporters, fans, potential owners, sponsors and groups the sport relies on for survival. Numbers might also point to issues to address, trends to follow (or not to follow). By my unofficial count we’ve lost three horses from 458 individual starts in NSA races this year. There ought to be an official number.

If you’re connected to a race meet and have any input, make sure the information gets passed along to Virginia Tech. Thanks.