[BretLudwig]

(( I hope to hell the whole line starts imploding and billions are lost
and horse racing gets serious legal interference. The important lesson
here is genetics, and by extension, eugenics. Horse breeding is horse
eugenics. It's that goddamned simple. Bret. ))

Eight Belles' breakdown: a predictable tragedy


"As the 20 horses were being loaded into the starting gate for the
Kentucky Derby, with Eight Belles -- standing in post position five --
poised to make her bid to become only the fourth filly in history to win
America's most important race, Ellen Parker, a thoroughbred breeding
consultant and analyst in Kentucky, said quietly to her husband, "I just
hope this filly doesn't break down."

No, Ellen Parker is not given to eerie premonitions. Now 61, she has spent
most of her adult life studying and analyzing blood-horse pedigrees; and
for years, she's been consulting clients and arguing vociferously in her
newsletter, Pedlines, on the need for thoroughbred breeders to aim for
soundness, for durability, as they plotted their matings. She has often
sounded, in this equine world driven now by speed, greed and the soulless
dictates of the marketplace, like the voice literally crying in the
wilderness. What so concerned her on the eve of this Derby, what she found
so disturbing, even infuriating, traced to her unshakable belief that Eight
Belles was carrying in her DNA the seeds of her own destruction.

Specifically, in the pedigree of this speedy gray filly, Parker had seen
the same kind of dangerous crosses -- in her case, lines of known
unsoundness triply crossed behind an unsound sire line -- that she
believed had contributed to the racetrack breakdowns and deaths of such
prominent horses as Ruffian and Go For Wand, of George Washington and Pine
Island, and even of Barbaro. Indeed, when Ellen Parker first perused the
bloodlines of Eight Belles, she saw a danger clear and present: a family
tree that bore three branches of the extremely brilliant but unsound
racehorse Raise a Native, who was a very muscular chestnut, heavy on the
front end, who had won all four of his starts before he broke down in
front and limped off to stud.

Eight Belles, shown here with trainer Larry Jones before the Kentucky
Derby, might have been genetically predisposed to breaking down.
Raise a Native came by his lack of durability quite naturally. He was the
fastest son sired by the equally brilliant Native Dancer, racing's
immortal "Gray Ghost," whose record of 21 victories in 22 starts was
spoiled only by a loss to Dark Star in the 1953 Kentucky Derby. By the
time Native Dancer had reached age 4, when he started only three times
through August, he had gotten so sore due to a chronic inflammation in his
ankles -- he reportedly had developed osselets, bony growths along his
ankle joints -- that his owner and breeder, Alfred G. Vanderbilt, was
forced to retire him to Sagamore, Vanderbilt's Maryland farm. There, The
Dancer rose to become one of the most successful and influential
progenitors in the history of the breed. Through one grandson, the
prepotent Northern Dancer, he helped found the most popular and prolific
sire line in the world; and through another grandson, the exceptionally
fast but unsound Mr. Prospector -- yes, a son of Raise a Native -- his
name gradually appeared at the roots of a far-flung web of sire lines and
families that rivaled Northern Dancer's.

And herein, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, lies the rub. The
thoroughbred breed is now so suffused with the precocious blood of Native
Dancer, so filled with his great-grandsons and great-granddaughters, so
shot through with distant offspring who carry the markers of his tribe --
extraordinary speed with limited durability and soundness -- that today it
threatens the viability of the entire breed. Of the 20 starters in the May
3 Kentucky Derby, every single one of them carried the blood of Native
Dancer. Of course, this line in and of itself is not to be condemned --
if, that is, it comes in reasonable doses and is counterbalanced by the
blood of sounder strains -- but in many of the Derby pedigrees, he
appeared multiple times. Native Dancer appeared four times in Eight
Belles' pedigree, most conspicuously in the three crosses of Raise a
Native that so troubled Parker when she saw them there.

Forde: Too much, too soon?

Horses and pitchers have something in common: They just don't seem to have
the stamina that they used to.

When Eight Belles shattered both of her ankles as she pulled up past the
finish line and galloped out around the clubhouse turn -- she obviously
broke one ankle first, then snapped the other as she dug it in to support
herself -- Parker was but one of millions who sat transfixed in horror as
the television camera showed the filly lying prostrate on the track. The
recriminations began at once. Columnists, bloggers, talk-show hosts and
other observers, some of whom actually know which end of the horse eats,
launched into a series of spontaneous public lectures detailing what the
problem was and what had to be done. Members of People for the Ethical
Treatment of Animals (PETA) picketed the offices of the Kentucky State
Sports Authority in Lexington and flooded the organization with e-mails
protesting the sport. They unjustly condemned the trainer for running the
filly and the jockey for using his whip, however sparingly, the last
eighth of a mile.

What Ellen Parker wanted to know, when I spoke to her following the Derby,
was why no one was picketing Robert Clay's Three Chimneys Farm in Midway,
Ky., one of the pillars of the Blue Grass breeding establishment and the
place where Eight Belles was bred and from where she was sold as a
yearling, at Keeneland in 2006, for $375,000.

"They're the ones who created this tragedy," Parker said. "Robert Clay is
smart enough to know better. He bred her. That's where it starts. You
don't blame the trainer, who does not have the reputation of breaking
horses down, and you don't blame the poor little jockey. ... She was
inbred three times to Raise a Native! [She broke down] right where Raise a
Native was the weakest, right in the ankles, and everybody acts like they
don't know what caused this filly to break down. It's written right there
for everyone to see! Except they refuse to see it. To admit it is to
address the fact that all these stallions that are bred like that, that
all the yearlings that are bred like that, are potential accidents waiting
to happen. And they've got so much money wrapped up in this crap!"


All 20 starters in this year's Kentucky Derby could trace their bloodlines
back to Native Dancer, shown here with owner and breeder A.G. Vanderbilt
after winning the 1952 Fall Highweight Handicap.
Less than two weeks after conceding to the Wall Street Journal that
"there's a blessing and a curse" involved in breeding descendents of
Native Dancer, Three Chimneys' pedigree advisor, Anne Peters, told
ESPN.com, "To blame it on Raise a Native is absurd. Any good mating is a
balance of speed and stamina and soundness, and this is a good mating. It
is a balance of speed and stamina and soundness. The mating was designed
to add soundness through other sources. The fact of the matter is, the
filly was sound."

What is clear right now, in the wake of Eight Belles' death, is that horse
racing has arrived at yet another wrenching moment of crisis and
self-examination, one even more critical than the first one I experienced
more than 30 years ago. That was on July 6, 1975, when the fastest filly
that I ever saw, the undefeated Ruffian -- in a nationally televised match
race with Foolish Pleasure -- pulverized the sesamoids in her right front
ankle and had to be destroyed. Like Eight Belles', Ruffian's pedigree did
not guarantee her demise, but it certainly telegraphed her vulnerabilities
to breaking down under the most extreme physical pressures that the sport
can offer. Ruffian's soft-boned sire, Reviewer, had broken a leg three
times while in training as a racehorse, and had to be destroyed after
breaking down a fourth time in a paddock accident while serving at stud.
And, as Parker has pointed out more than once, Ruffian's dam, Shenanigans,
was a daughter of Native Dancer. So she had the same genetic predisposition
for unsoundness hanging from the top and bottom branches of her family
tree.

"Ruffian was an accident waiting to happen," Parker lamented.

In 1993, after watching Union City break down in the Preakness and then
the Preakness winner, Prairie Bayou, shatter bones in the Belmont three
weeks later -- both horses were euthanized on the track -- I reported and
wrote a long investigative story for Sports Illustrated in which I found
that, over the past few decades, a sea change had occurred in the breeding
of thoroughbred horses, leading to a genetic weakening of the breed, a
softening of the horse as a racetrack competitor and the increased use of
a variety of drugs, some legal and some not, to keep this weakened,
softened animal competitive on the track.

Like Eight Belles, Ruffian, winning the Coaching Club American Oaks here
in 1975, was "an accident waiting to happen," according to Ellen Parker.
Through the first 60 years of the 20th century, most of the major
stallions and many of the best mares were owned and controlled by some of
the oldest families and richest sporting patrons in America, by the
Whitneys and Woodwards, the Bradleys and Wideners, the Klebergs and
Mellons. They bred horses to race them, not to sell them, and they did so
in order to compete against one other -- to beat their fellow members of
The Jockey Club, to see who had the fastest horse. A cardinal article of
their faith was to "improve the breed," which meant to breed a horse with
great speed, stamina and soundness. In fact, on the C.V. Whitney farm in
Lexington, a foal born with a crooked leg was usually taken into the woods
and shot, lest he or she pollute the Whitney bloodlines with this inherent
deformity.

By the middle of the last century, this tight-knit racing world began to
change. As these families died out and their blue-chip breeding stock was
sold at dispersal auctions, the best stallions and mares fell into the
hands of commercial breeders, whose central motivation was to breed, not
so much a sound or durable horse, but rather an attractive horse, a
"cosmetic horse," who showed well, who had a pedigree filled with
fashionable names, preferably sire lines that glowed with speed, and who
thus would draw the biggest price at the fanciest yearlings sales. Because
they needed to look like show horses, these hothouse yearlings were often
raised in small pens and not allowed to run free, or to kick, bite and
roughhouse with their peers.

So, not only did the industry begin to breed horses less sound, in
general, but also horses that were raised more softly, with kid gloves.
John Nerud, the 95-year-old former manager of Tartan Farm, a private stud
in Florida, points with pride at all the wonderful racehorses he bred and
raised and retired sound, horses like the great Dr. Fager and the sprinter
Ta Wee.

"These horses all retired sound because we raised 'em out in the open,"
Nerud said. "We did not hothouse 'em or prep 'em for sales. It makes quite
a difference when your foal or yearling can run in a pasture. The pounding
of those legs strengthens them when they are young and you'll grow a
better bone on a horse."

What has happened, with the passage of years, is that the thoroughbred is
no longer the resilient, hard-boned, robust racehorse that he was in the
days when horses were starting 40 or 50 times in a career -- back, for
instance, when the great 1940s handicap star, Stymie, started 131 times in
six years of racing, a physical impossibility for any horse today.

It's possible that no amount of care or preparation could have saved Eight
Belles in light of her bloodlines.
Dr. Larry Bramlage, a prominent equine veterinarian out of Lexington, said
that the mid-20th century racehorse was "a bit more angular,
narrower-chested, with tendencies toward being knock-kneed, the
conformation of human distance runners. Today, if you take the breed as a
whole, they are broader chested with tendencies toward being bowlegged and
pigeon-toed. Like human sprinters. All fast human sprinters tend toward
bowleggedness."

The horses who are populating the studs these days tend to retire with far
fewer starts, their durability and soundness be damned. Nerud would never
have bred a mare to such an animal in the past.

"We didn't breed to unsound, light-boned horses," he said. "Today, our
horses are very delicate, very light-boned. I don't blame the breeders.
They have to breed a cosmetic horse who will show good in the sales ring.
But we are breeding ourselves into a hole. We breed light-boned sires that
run five or six times to mares who run five or six times. Now what do you
expect to get? The resulting foal ends up lucky to run five or six
times."

Indeed, in North America, the average number of yearly starts per runner
declined from 11.31 per year in 1960 to 6.37 per year in 2006.

No wonder Bramlage said, "We're not rewarding longevity like we used to.
If we keep going at the rate we're going, the logical conclusion is that
we'll be down to one start per year for a horse. I don't think we'll ever
get there, but this ship will have to right its course."

Drying up the gene pool

Why is the thoroughbred gene pool in danger? Here's one possible reason.

In 1791, James Weatherby wrote the original English-based stud book,
called "The General Stud Book," in which he painstakingly compiled a
listing of the pedigrees of 387 mares, each of which, according to the
U.S. Jockey Club, "could be traced to Eclipse, who was a direct descendent
of the Dareley Arabian; to Matchem, a grandson of the Godolphin Arabian;
and Herod, whose great-great grandsire was the Beyerly Turk."

These three sires form the foundation of the thoroughbred breed. The
American counterpart to "The General Stud Book," called "The American Stud
Book," was first published in 1873 by a chap named Colonel Sanders D.
Bruce, a Kentuckian, who had spent his whole life researching pedigrees of
American thoroughbreds. In 1896, Bruce's six volumes were taken over in
America by The Jockey Club, whose offices are in New York, and formed the
U.S. stud book.

"Integrity of The American Stud Book is the foundation on which
Thorougbred breeding and racing in America depend," states The Jockey
Club.

These stud books are closed. If you look at the extended pedigrees of any
racehorse in America, there is not a single name that does not trace back
to the original female familes or to one of the three foundation sires,
most of them (90 per cent) to Eclipse, who was dominant.

In the U.S., every name in every pedigree -- no matter how far back you go
-- is registered as a thoroughbred, a pure thoroughbred, with The Jockey
Club. By closed, I mean that no mutt can get into the registry. When
Secretariat was going to stud at Claiborne Farm, he was test-bred to an
appaloosa mare, but the resulting foal, born in Minnesota, was a
half-breed who could not be registered as a thoroughbred. Nor was this
meant to be. It was a test to see if the horse was fertile. The Jockey
Club, which approves the registering of all thoroughbreds, would consider
this foal to be a "warm blood," as opposed to a pure bred or hot blood.

To strengthen the breed with other, sounder strains, those in charge of
registering thoroughbreds would have to "open" up their stud books to
allow these slower warm bloods in; and as Ellen Parker says, that ain't
gonna happen. Breeders are stuck with what is in there now. The Jockey
Club sees itself as a guardian at the gate, protecting the purity of the
breed from the mongrel hordes, the Quarter-Horses and Standardbreds and
all the other hybrids who eat grass. Intruders are not welcome. Post no
bills, Tonto. Take a hike.

The door is closed.

This gradual softening and weakening of the breed has led to the use of
more medications to keep these horses running sound, among them the
corticosteroids injected into injured knees and ankles. The cortisone
reduces inflammation and allows horses to run pain-free on the damaged
limbs or joints, a dangerous practice, if done repeatedly, because it can
lead to a more serious injury and to the much-feared catastrophic
breakdown. When I started going to races in the 1950s, I hardly ever saw a
fatal breakdown on the Chicago dirt tracks; but when I started covering the
sport in 1972, in New York, I began seeing numerous breakdowns during a
race meet, sometimes two or three a week. One veterinarian told me that
this was no accident, that this was the time period when cortisone began
to get widespread use on U.S. racetracks, the first signal to me that
drugs were a culprit in the sudden increase in catastrophic breakdowns.

"Medication is a symptom," Parker said. "They need medication because
they're not sound to begin with. Why else would you give it to a horse?"

Drugs are only one way that the industry has been trying to make up for
the weakening of the American thoroughbred. A number of racetracks have
already replaced their dirt tracks with softer Polytrack surfaces, for the
purpose of reducing breakdowns, but all we know about these tracks is that
they often are the bane of true speed horses, favoring come-from-behind
plodders. They have made the outcome of races so unpredictable that they
have driven the high-rolling, sophisticated gamblers away from the betting
parlors; and they may or may not save horses' lives. The jury remains
sequestered.

All such expedients are aimed at forgiving commercial breeders for what
they have done to the breed. At the core of the problem is the fact that
the fastest and most popular sire lines in the world are the least durable
and sound. The many lines that branch out from Native Dancer include names
that fairly light up a yearling catalogue page and bring the highest
prices, and Parker sees their presence and influence so much on the rise
-- so much Northern Dancer and Raise a Native, so much Danzig and
Danehill, so much Nureyev and Sadler's Wells, so much Storm Cat and Storm
Bird -- that she fears a gene pool grown narrow and dry, one in which it
will be impossible to find a sound, viable outcross unless the grand
pooh-bahs open up The American Stud Book, which has been closed to
anything but purebred thoroughbreds for more than 100 years.

"You think The Jockey Club is going to allow something like that?" she
asked. "Not hardly. What you have to deal with is what's left, and what's
left is very little."

In her latest issue of Pedlines, written after Eight Belles' death, Parker
wrote how such intense inbreeding to Raise a Native "creates nothing but
tragedy. There is no good thing about it and there is no excuse for it.
Dr. Larry Bramlage says he seldom sees injuries like this. Well, he better
get used to it, because sales catalogues are full of this horrible cross.
Breeders are either oblivious or think it's inevitable. But what is really
inevitable is that every time a Barbaro grinds a limb to a pulp, every time
a Pine Island dies at the Breeders' Cup, every time an Eight Belles' death
destroys the joy of a Kentucky Derby, we lose another chunk of what little
fan base we have left."

What base is left will be tuned in on Saturday for Big Brown's charge to
win the Preakness. All the folks involved in the game, of course, will be
wringing their hands at the start, wishing for Brownie not only to
continue his attempt to sweep the Triple Crown, which has not been won
since 1978, but also to pull up sound and in one piece. Memories of
Barbaro at Pimlico are still raw. So, especially, are remembrances of
Eight Belles at Churchill.

Big Brown is inbred to Northern Dancer. His sire, Boundary, is by Danzig,
a son of Northern Dancer who was known for his bad knees; and Brownie's
dam, Mien, is by Nureyev, another son of Northern Dancer.

But the Derby winner also has been gifted with the sound blood of other
lines, from old warriors like Round Table and Damascus, and may they carry
the horse, and finally the day, in Baltimore."

http://sports.espn.go.com/sports/hor...ill&id=3399004
William Nack was a senior writer at Sports Illustrated for nearly 25 years
and covered stories in a variety of sports and on a range of subjects. He
is the author of three books, including "Ruffian: A Racetrack Romance,"
"My Turf: Horses, Boxers, Blood-Money and the Sporting Life" and
"Secretariat: The Making of a Champion."

(P.S. Props to VNN for pointing this out. )
16 May, 2008
Mintro: Spindleshanked Partlybreds: Horses for Courses; Or, Itz Science if
Theyre Horses, Racism if Theyre Humans
Posted by alex in sports, media, Alex Linder at 4:46 pm | Permanent Link

You can write sensibly and logically about bloodlines, but only when it
concerns horses. Nevertheless, the same iron rules of soundness and
pedigree apply to human strains too. As a great man once said, €œfacts
are the things that dont go away when you stop believing in them.€�
Race isnt everything, but its a hell of a lot. The jews communal
eugenics prove they know this truth, and their allowing the race-truth
about racehorses into their sports publications while excluding the
race-truth about men from their mass newspapers for the goyeem proves
their deceitful intent. How can horses be sound or unsound in bone and
bloodline, yet men, too of bone and blood, be equal? They cant.
Raciality dispels equality in the way that fact dispels religious
superstition, and that is why you will never read the truth about race
science as it pertains to humans in a paper produced in a €˜democracy,
in which €˜men are equal. Though youre welcome to read it as it
pertains to the set on hoofs. Just dont forget the sign on the wall:
parallel makers will be shot as hate criminals. Is the negroid unsound?
Does he come from a long line of short-lived crack hos and daddy
bangabouts? No. Remember the Commandments. Hes your equal. There is not
the slightest reason to believe that the seventh ******* sired on the sixth
mother by deceased 25-year-old crack salesman LeMongello Dawkins will be a
whit less sound than your White son or daughter.

Eight Belles breakdown: a predictable tragedy
By William Nack
[ESPN will not allow direct link to article, will reflect to main page,
espn.com]



http://www.vanguardnewsnetwork.com/?p=2911

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[RapidRonnie]

On May 18, 9:16 pm, "BretLudwig" wrote:
(( I hope to hell the whole line starts imploding and billions are lost
and horse racing gets serious legal interference. The important lesson
here is genetics, and by extension, eugenics. Horse breeding is horse
eugenics. It's that goddamned simple. Bret. ))


I feel pretty bad for the animal, who did not ask to be bred for show
and run for speed.

[Clyde Slick]

On 19 Mai, 13:33, RapidRonnie wrote:
On May 18, 9:16 pm, "BretLudwig" wrote:

*(( I hope to hell the whole line starts imploding and billions are lost
and horse racing gets serious legal interference. The important lesson
here is genetics, and by extension, eugenics. Horse breeding is horse
eugenics. It's that goddamned simple. Bret. ))

*I feel pretty bad for the animal, who did not ask to be bred for show
and run for speed.

Worse things usually happen to wild horses.
After all, it's a coyote eat horse world out there!