Letter to the Editor: Jeff Morris
A few words on the PETA expose, and racing’s apparent response:
First, it must be recognized that PETA’s disingenuousness over the course of many years has been well chronicled. They slant, sensationalize, and propagandize, all in an effort to tug the heart strings and wallets of a credulous public. But while I find PETA’s tactics repellant and so often utterly mindless, I cannot join the throng of my racing comrades bent on dismissing the message simply because the messenger may be loathsome. PETA’s motives may be questionable, and their video may be misleading, but their spear is well aimed and we all know it.
If this isn’t finally the time for us to face racing’s dark side like adults, then I just don’t know what we’re waiting for. As a former trainer, now breeder, and lifelong admirer of these beautiful animals we’re so privileged to share our lives with, I have a definite dog in this hunt. I would do anything to better the sport, and to do my part in shepherding it safely through these hard times so that future generations in America may know the many great joys experienced only on the hallowed grounds of our many great racetracks. But there’s a thing called intellectual honesty, and it’s defined by the personal recognition and acknowledgment of hard truths even when those truths pose a threat to one’s own self-interest. For my part, I’m tired of rampant drug use, both legal and illegal. I’m tired of high death and injury rates being relativized. I’m tired of open secrets (as to who’s cheating and on what grand scale) being apparently tolerated by racing’s various jurisdictions. I’m tired of certain individuals being granted tacit permission for their misdeeds because they are, presumably, too big and/or too prominent to expel, lest we betray to the public that some of our greatest living paragons are really nothing more than vulgar frauds and cheats. None of those conditions is defensible, and I’m not even going to try.
The most shocking dimension of it all is the reaction of our sport’s very participants. I read a piece now circulating social media by a gentleman who’s asserting that the best medicine for the PETA video is to ignore it altogether. That “rational minds” must prevail. But what that says to me is that we should resign to willful ignorance. That we must continue to slumber away as an industry, as we have for so long, because after all, PETA is an unfit messenger. I’m sorry, the time for genuinely “rational minds” to show and assert themselves was WAY before this video ever came into being. But there haven’t been any rational, wise, forward-looking, or benevolent minds involved in the equation for a very long time. What we primarily seem to have is greed, short-sightedness, and utter stupidity occupying racing’s positions of “leadership,” and it has inspired not just a waning relevance as a sport (and that’s putting it kindly), but also an environment where the disgusting callousness shown in this footage is indignantly dismissed by the very people who are supposed to love and value the horses above all else. There’s something dizzyingly wrong with this picture. Where’s the outrage from within? Where’s the demand for reform? Where’s the revulsion on behalf of the horses themselves? PETA isn’t the point. What we all know to be true is what’s salient here, and that is that our sport is deathly ill, its contraction is accelerating, common-sense reforms seem to be a non-starter, and the environment we’ve permitted to evolve as related to the safety and well-being of the horses is unforgivable. If the stunning idiocy of our industry’s general reaction to the PETA expose is accurately summarized by nearly all that I’ve been reading lately on social media and elsewhere, then I fear we have no claim to a worthiness of being saved as a sport, and anyone who is at all morally or ethically serious must admit that.
We’re confronted here with some serious of character questions, as well as the demand for a little bit of soul searching: Do we mean what we say when we declare love for our horses, or is it all merely lip service? Are we committed to building a sport and an industry that we can be proud of? Are we willing to be transparent? And are we willing to make hard choices, and to take decisive action, in order to make right what is currently so very wrong? Our actions, not our words, will finally answer these questions. So far, I’m not encouraged.
Jeff Morris is a former trainer from Arcadia, CA. He currently resides in Raleigh, NC. and owns a small breeding farm where he resides with his wife and four children.