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By Carly Phillips When a person is asked to think about exploited non-human animals used for entertainment, the brain usually goes to the most well-known cases. The whales and dolphins in their fishbowls in Sea World. The animals cramped in cages in zoos all across the country, across the world. The elephants and lions and tigers who have all of their natural instincts “trained” out of them, so they are docile enough to be let in front of a crowd. However, no one usually gives a second thought to horses bred for racing. Why would they? Horse racing is just a sport, it’s fun for all parties involved. Apart from the fact that, on average, close to ten horses died each week at American racetracks in 2018. If you do the math, that’s five hundred and twenty horses dead in a year. These deaths are due largely to unnatural reasons that are directly connected to the act of racing, and that is why racing needs to be outlawed in the United States.
Horse racing is an extremely old sport, and while it can be hard to pinpoint the first ever horse race, the first horse race held in the U.S was in New York in mid-sixteen hundred. The most commonly known form of racing is called a flat race. This type of race is what is usually shown in movies and television. Flat races are when the horses run on a completely flat track. According to a figure on the EQUIBASE website, by the time 2019 is up, there will have been 136 tracks that held horse races held across the nation. This may not seem like that big of a number, but that is only the number of places where these races are held. Racetracks usually hold races for large chunks of time, sometimes months long. In addition to that, there is more than one kind of race the horses can be forced to compete in, which only further adds to that number. |
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This is a website about nonhuman animals, written by human animals taking a Society and Animals class at Minnesota State University, Mankato. Archives
April 2024
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