Safety, welfare issues front and center as Global Symposium on Racing begins

TUCSON, Ariz. – Safety and welfare issues that continue to bedevil the racing industry took center stage on the opening morning of this year’s Global Symposium on Racing, with a number of racing officials arguing that protocols implemented at racetracks this year have made a measurable impact on injury rates already.

Presentations on the opening morning of the conference, annually held in Tucson, Ariz., by the University of Arizona’s Race Track Industry Program, included a discussion of the changes made at racetracks in the wake of a spate of deaths at Santa Anita early in 2019 that drew national attention to the sport and threatened its existence in California. Racetracks and horsemen’s groups have struggled to mount a concerted response to the deaths and concerns, although most have claimed that they are committed to making difficult changes in order to reduce catastrophic injuries.

“I can tell you that we are better, and that we are going to do even better in the future,” said Alan Foreman, representing a coalition of racing interests in states in the Mid-Atlantic and Northeast that have banded together to commit to a so-called “strategic plan” to reduce equine fatalities.

During one of the Tuesday morning presentations, Dr. Dionne Benson, who was hired as chief veterinary officer by Santa Anita’s parent company, The Stronach Group, after the spate of deaths had crested in March, listed the company’s numerous changes to medication, training, and veterinary protocols, which included an unprecedented effort in racing to better monitor horses during training hours and the implementation of far stricter therapeutic medication protocols.

Benson said that catastrophic injuries have declined 70 percent in racing and 65 percent in training at Santa Anita since the changes were implemented, which ended up reducing the catastrophic injury rate at the track to about its historical norm (creating the possibility that the injuries were merely returning to the mean after a cluster at the beginning of the year).

“This can work,” she said, citing the reductions. “These interventions can help.”

Benson added that the policies implemented by The Stronach Group will cost the company approximately $1 million each year in each of the four regions where the company operates tracks. That is over and above the investment the company has been making in buying sophisticated scanning machines, such as a positron emission tomography (PET) scanner that was being delivered to Santa Anita as she made her speech, she said.

The panel with Benson also featured Jill Byrne, the vice president of racing operations at Colonial Downs in Virginia, which re-opened this year after a five-year hiatus. Byrne described how track officials made an early commitment to adopt best practices at the new meet, citing the situation at Santa Anita, and as a result it implemented many of the same protocols, at significant cost of time, money, and effort.

Not a single horse died at the track during its 15-day race meet, held over five weeks in August and September, either during racing or training.

“I know a lot of that could be based on luck, but a lot of hard work went into it,” Byrne said.

Earlier in the day, Jennifer Durenberger, The Jockey Club steward at the tracks operated by the New York Racing Associations, argued during a presentation that the crisis facing the sport will require all racing participants to familiarize themselves with the growing body of literature focusing on a “social license to operate” in order to properly respond to crises involving issues of animal welfare. Durenberger has created several similar presentations over the past three years, remarks that have proved to be entirely prescient for the issues dominating the discussion of racing throughout this year.

In laying out the definition of a social license, Durenberger argued that racing will need to constantly re-examine its response to welfare concerns in order to maintain its credibility and trust with the public.

“Racing must come to appreciate and zealously guard its social license to operate,” she said.

Dr. Benson referred to the same dynamic in her own presentation, when she said that by the end of this year, racing fatalities will be the lowest in California for this year since the mid-1990s, when the deaths first began being tracked. (California tracks ran a far lower number of racing dates this year than they have in previous years.)

“Times have changed around us, and we can no longer be okay with 30 fatalities or even 20 fatalities,” Benson said. “We are going to be pushed harder and harder on that every year.”