Because 22 Thoroughbreds were fatally injured at Santa Anita this winter – now 23 with the loss of Arms Runner on Sunday – there is a distinct likelihood that within a matter of months jockeys in California no longer will be allowed to strike their horses during the running of a parimutuel race.Of course, there is no proven connection between the use of whips and the fatalities. That is beside the point. The public’s image of horse racing has taken such a brutal beating that everything must be done to restore at least a trace of the equilibrium that allows such an ancient pastime to exist in the modern world.That deal was broken this winter when horses who should not have been training or racing went forth on racing surfaces that were compromised by a series of storms that had been forecast several months ago. The damage requires reform not only in medication rules, pre-race inspections, and diagnostic technology, but also in a fundamental examination of how horses bear the burden of the profit motive in their breeding, selling, and racing in a highly monetized environment.So why not do the easy stuff first. Eliminating the whipping of horses in full public view has always been the “well, duh” solution to about 99 percent of public-image problems. The reform adopted last week by the California Horse Racing Board and sent to public comment would allow jockeys to continue carrying whips but use them only for “safety” measures.More than 30 years ago, when Trevor Denman was still a relatively fresh face on the California scene as a South African novelty in the Santa Anita announcer’s booth, he suggested to anyone who would listen that perhaps horse racing should consider a fundamental change in the use of the whip to proactively align itself with the growing movement concerned with animal welfare.Denman, who trained briefly as a jockey in his teens, came from a culture that considered whipping a last resort and levied severe punishment for excessive use. His concerns were greeted by scorn, verbal abuse, and institutional resistance, which did nothing to persuade him that he was on the wrong track.“It was like flipping the Oscar Wilde quotation, ‘If everyone agrees with me, I think I must be wrong,’ ” Denman said. “Since no one agreed with me, I thought I must be right.”And he was, as it turned out, despite the constant drumbeat of opposition to whip reforms that deploys justifications like “horses run from the whip” and “they don’t really hurt” or “horseplayers expect it” and “we’ve always done it this way.”“I would have been better off to have just shut my mouth,” Denman said. “People would turn their back on me. ‘Why are you going public with this. You’re only giving racing a black eye.’“The real killer of an argument is that you can have no whips and you will see no change in the sport,” he said. “You’ll have nine winners a day, a pick six, exactas, and nobody will know the difference.”For all his passion on the subject, Denman has been an incrementalist when it has come to changing rules governing the whip and its use. “You started with the whips themselves,” he said. “They were long, flat, and heavy. The ‘feathers’ meant to protect the horse were cut off. The popper was like a piece of lead. When I saw the first horse come back cut in the flank, I thought, ‘My god, this is barbaric.’ Animal cruelty has gone on forever, but that doesn’t make it right, and attaching practical applications to animal cruelty doesn’t make its case.”As the 90s dawned, Denman was in the forefront of whip reform, testifying before the California Horse Racing Board that reality was not aligned with their intentions.“I told them every single whip in the jockeys’ room was illegal,” he recalled. “They didn’t have the proper dimensions, too long, too heavy. The guy following me was a Hall of Fame jockey. A commissioner said to him, ‘You’re going to tell me Trevor is wrong.’ With a sheepish grin the jockey said, ‘No, he’s right.’ ”So the dimensions of the whip were changed, the number of strikes were limited, and whips were banned on early 2-year-olds. Denman, an unapologetic member of PETA, celebrates the fact that the current rule under consideration is finally a chance to position racing as an acceptable anachronism.“It has been a matter of rejection, reflection, and finally recognition,” Denman said. “If they’d done this 30 years ago, I definitely think we would not have gotten to this stage of public outrage.“The rule is pacifier for the industry to be allowed to hang on to the whip but not really use it,” he added. “I think the older, better jockeys will soon say that carrying a whip is just getting in the way, they’ll stop completely, and that will go through the rest of the jockeys’ room.”And will other jurisdictions beyond California follow suit?“It will be very hard to fight against the idea,” Denman said. “With such a rule in California, who would stand up in this day and age and say, ‘You must use the whip’? As horrible as what has happened, maybe that’s what it took. Maybe those horses didn’t die in vain.”