It's THAT Time of Year Again

It's horse racing season again, and that means that all around the world beautiful equines are going to be whipped into running faster than the ones around them. The only sport that horse racing is better than is greyhound racing, because there is even less done to help the greyhounds than the horses.

1.5 horses die out of every 1,000 starts at Thoroughbred courses in America. The U.S. Jockey Club estimates that in 2006 alone, 600 horses died on the tracks. The United States is clearly the worst offender: in Hong Kong, there are only .58 deaths out of every 1,000 starts. This is believed to be a result of the drugs used in American horse racing that are banned in every other country.

Between the mid-1970s and mid-1990s, between 50 and 100 racehorses were insured against death, accident, or disease, and were then slaughtered so the owners could collect the insurance money. This included Henry the Hawk, whose owner's father collected US$150,000 when he killed his daughter's horse. In addition, Helen Brach was killed because she threatened to report the horse killers to the authorities.

And then there's greyhound racing, which I mentioned earlier. The majority of racing greyhounds have some kind of tooth problem, and nobody knows the true cause, though they certainly speculate. Due to lack of proper treatments for prevention, most greyhounds also have parasites. Doping is even worse in greyhound racing than it is in horse racing.

Fortunately, greyhounds who are beyond their racing years are now being adopted. Before adoption began, 20,000 greyhounds a year were being killed because they had not performed well enough at the tracks to breed. However, some people dispute the high adoption figures given by the National Greyhound Association, and the NGA even released a statement saying that they don't now what happens to many greyhounds. Sometimes they are sold to laboratories for experimentation, and one man alone in northeastern England killed 10,000 greyhounds. One man.

Fortunately, these grisly sports are losing their popularity and, within a matter of years, should either be improved or gone.