Alan F. Balch - Who’s responsible?!

The California Horse Racing Board, our state’s regulator, recently announced a meeting of its Medication, Safety, and Welfare Committee, for a public “discussion regarding the advisability of penalizing trainers for injuries and fatalities for horses in their care.”

In early 2019, management decisions at Santa Anita, track conditions, and abnormal weather, combined for several weeks to produce greater risk of calamitous injury to our horses than any of us could remember.  Not only did this draw nationwide, even worldwide attention to serious animal welfare issues in the sport, it also resulted in a temporary closure of Santa Anita itself for track reconditioning.  A spate of regulatory elaborations followed, along with new legislation as well as “house rules” intended to address the need for reform.

At the outset of my life in the sport (when most show horses were former race horses), and especially when I joined Santa Anita’s management, I was taught that respect for interdependence was critical to our industry’s success.

Nobody said it better than Edward L. Bowen, of The Blood-Horse, about 30 years ago, in his column entitled “The ‘without us’ syndrome: ‘without us, there would be no game,’ is a comment made often, usually with a hint of self-righteousness.  It is one of the most galling comments we know, and yet it is heard all too frequently in racing.  The comment is self-congratulatory, but ultimately self-destructive, for it unmasks a basic inability to grasp the interdependence of various segments.”

When I was in management, I heard this more often than I would like to remember from trainers, owners, and breeders.  When I was away from racing for about a decade, I heard it from acquaintances in every segment of the sport.  Now that I’ve been associated with the trainers, I hear it most often from owners and track management.  

Permit me to quote Bowen again at length.  “The approach that without us, there would be no game, stands in the way of progress.  It is a simplistic approach, blinkered on both sides, for it is so self-evident in every case that it hardly bears repeating.  It should be patently obvious that without owners there would be no horses and therefore no racing; without tracks there would be no place for horses to race or fans to assemble; without trainers and jockeys, there could be no Thoroughbred racing as we know it; without mutuel machines run by technically knowledgeable professionals, the wheel that drives the industry could not turn; without breeders, there would be no source of horses; without backstretch personnel, the game would grind to a halt; without fans and bettors, racing would recede to hobby status; without the rules, legislative, and regulatory arms, the industry would be chaotic, or illegal.”

The progress we’ve made in California improving our safety record since 2019 is remarkable . . . but it’s only progress, not perfection.  And as if to demonstrate their closed-mindedness, racing’s enemies will doubtless take this public opportunity to discuss potential new rules assigning penalties to trainers for equine injuries to flog us all even more mercilessly.

Most if not all trainers have respected the need for continuing regulatory reform and enhanced oversight since 2019; new legislation and increasingly burdensome rules have been accepted with varying degrees of grace, of course.  That’s only human nature.

But what is more important is that trainers are only one critical part of the progress.  

In this interdependent sport of ours, every segment has had a key role, and borne their own increasing burdens.  As the most prominent faces of racing generally, track operators have endured significantly increased expenses and administrative challenges, not to mention public relations and staffing crises.  Owners and breeders have withstood negativity never before experienced, not to mention reduced opportunities and economic hardship themselves.  Veterinarians have never worked harder, nor with more visibility and risk.  Employees and vendors (including the backstretch community) have felt unprecedented strains.  Support of our fans for an embattled sport has been tested severely.  And our regulator, representing the state government to the public, has been subject to a merciless onslaught of misinformation, disinformation, and brutal, unfair criticism from all sides, beyond any previous boundaries. 

The progress we’ve achieved, therefore, is based on every one of our interdependent segments working together to achieve the same goal, whatever tensions might exist between them.  Efforts toward reform have affected them all.  Continuing to work together will achieve greater progress; the opposite courts ever more disaster.

The old aphorism to “fix the problem, not the blame,” is apt here.  However great the temptation to assign blame for equine injuries and fatalities to one constituency, it must be resisted, even scorned.

To do otherwise is to risk the progress in equine safety already made and rightly celebrated, and turn racing’s interdependent segments against each other as never before.