[Dion]

The chuckwagon races must go on!

All horse sport is risky, because for all their size and power, horses are actually quite fragile animals in crucial parts of their bodies — mainly in their feet and leg tendons and ligaments. Chuckwagon races may exhibit somewhat elevated risks, but there is no horse sport that has none (including Dressage, where overtraining can produce injuries, and where one could argue that horses’ natural need for liberty is so curtailed at the upper echelons of the sport in order to protect these valuable animals that it is a form of abuse).

Many a horse has also died on racetracks. They have heart attacks or experience sudden ligament or bone injuries that are so serious they have to be put down. It isn’t because people who own them are careless, irresponsible or uncaring. These are all extremely valuable horses. They are the best cared-for horses in the world. Perhaps 1% of their lives is spent working at full capacity under difficult conditions. The rest of the time they are fed, housed, exercised, groomed and loved like no other creatures on Earth. Apart from dressage, elite competition horses are doing what they love to do: run and jump. They are the equivalent of working Labradors, who may sometimes be covered in mud, exhausted and hungry, but are the most contented creatures you’d ever find.

When you consider the number of horses that are involved in all these sports, and then look at the number of horses that have actually died as a direct victim of the sport itself — that is, not from an unanticipated heart attack, or some inherent physical deficit nobody could have known about — the ratio is not statistically alarming.

http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/...es-must-go-on/