Mark Cramer
When I spent three months living in a backside dormitory at Canterbury Park some years ago, it was culture shock for a guy who grew up playing stickball on the streets of New York.
My limited riding experiences confirmed that I was not the best partner for a horse, so at Canterbury I sought a shortcut to getting a feel for the Thoroughbred view of things. I hung out with jockeys, exercise riders and of course the grooms. My job was to help them with survival skills in English. Through their eyes I began learning about horses.
I observed that the most humane stables were those where the human-horse partnership thrived. The grooms I knew were at the mercy of their bosses, since there are few protective labor laws. Trainers more likely to treat their horses well were the same ones who treated their grooms with dignity.
So it was no surprise that the current PETA allegations reported in the New York Times about mistreatment of horses also involved the mistreatment of the human beings who took care of the horses. Perhaps the undercover investigator, zealously seeking a story of animal abuse, experienced a revelation that human rights and animal rights are not separate issues.
Even if a centralized authority is not to our liking, there are certain situations where it's necessary. With no enforced traffic laws, for example, it would get very messy out there at intersections. So now, rather than looking at this current scandal as a personal issue restricted to one trainer and his stable, horse racing needs a system of stop signs and red lights.
Of course, every trainer or owner who mistreats their horses or employees should bear personal responsibility. However, we'd be wrong in assuming that the problem can be reduced to weeding out the bad guys, many of whom were probably good guys before getting into the game.
The Mexican historian Jorge Castañeda once wrote that if you pour idealistic people into a rotten system, most of them will come out corrupted. Anarchy and drug infestation in the American racing industry is breeding some corrupt actors.
What better evidence than the impeccably proper trainer Freddy Head, who thrives on drug-free racing in France. Head felt obligated to give Lasix to Goldikova in the filly's second and third Breeders' Cup Mile, so that his opponents, he explained, would not get an unfair advantage.
French racing could be a good model. Without idealizing the French Jockey Club, we can observe here the results of Draconian regulations including the strict prohibition against race-day medication, as well as labor laws to protect the rights and health of the industry's most vulnerable employees.
French stables do not feel pressure to cheat because they know that their rivals are not going to get away with breaking the rules.
Obviously the invisible hand of the marketplace has done nothing to stop cheating and abuse in American racing, so why not the heavy hand of a strong central authority, with anti-drug regulations applied to all and enforced equitably and aggressively across the land. Such a mechanism works well in most other countries where racing exists and thrives, so why not in the USA?
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