Somewhere, far out of sight if not entirely out of mind, countless other former racehorses were on their way to being slaughtered.
“I struggle with it,” Diana Koebel said. She is the owner and trainer here at LumberJack Farm, one of hundreds of horse farms around the country helping rescue and rehabilitate thoroughbreds considered too slow or damaged to be worth anything more than horse meat. The rescuers cannot keep up.
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About 15 percent of the American horses slaughtered, horse advocates said, are thoroughbreds. Many are only a few years old but considered too broken to race and, therefore, to live.
“But there is a lot of life left,” the ReRun president, Laurie Condurso-Lane, said. Horses can live to 30 years or longer. “They are young. So why not find them new jobs?”
The spotlight that shines on horse racing during the Triple Crown events each spring rarely illuminates the shadows. The sport is usually painted with bright, pastoral backdrops. Winners of the biggest races become royalty, revered by people and seemingly destined for a pampered life doing little but producing more runners like them.
But most racehorses run a far different route — downward, slipping from rung to rung in the sport’s hierarchy. Some are traded a dozen or more times as their earnings fade, until someone decides that the horse is no longer worth the time and money to keep it.
It even happened to Ferdinand, the 1986 Kentucky Derby winner, who reportedly was slaughtered in Japan for pet food a few years ago.
More at Saving Horses, One Thoroughbred at a Time
