Date: Sun, 4 May 2008 11:10:55 -0400
From: David C. Bloom
To: Victor Bloom
Subject: Re: Native Dancer

Quoting Victor Bloom:

Do you think the increased frequency of these unfortunate events
has to do with the narrowing bloodlines, sacrificing bone strength
for speed?

==

Dad__  Nope.  I don’t think there is an “increasing frequency of these unfortunate events,” and I don’t think there has been a narrowing of thoroughbred bloodlines.  I’ll cover these two points in turn:

First, there have always been bad breaks – on the racetrack and off – before, during and after big races.  The only thing to be done in these situations is to put the animal down.  It’s tragic and it’s fact; the more Casa Bloom gets immersed in horse culture, the more we see how cruelly pragmatic the sport is.

There is an essential tension between elite athletes and trainers.
The trainers, who work for owners/sponsors whose incentives are glory and purses and lucrative endorsement contracts (a stud fee by another name), push their athletes to the very limit of performance.  This is where Bad Things Happen.  A Lance Armstrong or a Tiger Woods can say No, but not a racehorse.  Fearing the trainer’s whip (or worse, from a stablemate), the horse surpasses its own limits.  A horse has no judgment, no conscience, no motivation aside from its breeding and its training.  Run away from mountain lions.  Eat sweet grass.  Fuck other horses.

Eight Belles, following on the heels, as it were, of Barbaro’s bad break, may make it *seem* like the incidence is increasing, but in the big picture, it’s not.  The combination of Derby Hype and Media Rehashing amplifies what is, essentially, a coincidence.  Racehorses are little more than pampered galley slaves, bred and trained for three years to run like hell for two minutes.

Big Brown got a blanket of roses, but follow the lifestories of Pyro or Court Vision or any of the other Derby horses and you’ll find elite athletes, competing at the highest level, losing, then being culled.

To an owner and a trainer, the competition and the pressure is incredible.  So they dabble in eugenics, doping and psy-ops – and they push their athletes harder than any human would tolerate.  And the result is: a lot of dead horses.

Of Eight Belles, everyone said “she ran the race of her life; she ran her heart out” – and it’s true.  We may celebrate her swansong performance, but to me Eight Belles is just glue fodder.  Per Darwin, you need an Eight Belles to get a Secretariat.

Second, you posited that thoroughbred bloodlines were narrowing; the opposite is true.  “Thoroughbred” means, literally, “super-mutt.”  There are so many bloodlines, so many breeders, so many dams and so many studs that the US “herd” is genetically sound – even the subset Michigan thoroughbred herd is robust!  Even so, breeders are bringing in new DNA all the time – primarily from the Middle East, which has been in the racehorse husbandry business longer than anyone, and from Asia, where bloodlines are closer to feral.

Had Eight Belles survived, she could have commanded six- and seven-figure dam fees, and she would have led a pampered life, producing a foal every other year into her twenties.  The Jockey Club strictly regulates the thoroughbred industry, and their rules would prevent mating her to even a distant cousin.  And since the Jockey Club’s breeding charts go back a hundred years, we know that’s not gonna happen.

So what of “closed herds” – like the Icelandic horse or the Kalahari zebra – that lack the opportunity to introduce foreign DNA?  Here, Nature’s plan – and Her back-up plan – prove the robustness of genotype.  Even when stressed by low population, there is sufficient recession and mutation to maintain genetic diversity to ward off disease, adapt to changing conditions, to give up the weaker animals to Darwin, and to allow the stronger to breed disproportionally.

Eight Belles was a tragedy and a reminder of Barbaro.  The human mind seizes on such coincidences, and it is so eager to learn a lesson that it fabricates a trend where none exists.  Social psychologists call this a “cluster effect,” viz: if thoroughbred racing loses a hundred horses a year, then we should see two dead horses a week, right?

Wrong.  A hundred a year means a hundred a year.  But if we see four deaths in a week or six or eight, doesn’t that mean the rate is climbing?  No, it doesn’t.  It doesn’t mean anything.  Flip a coin a hundred times: if it comes out heads 55 times, it doesn’t mean the coin is fixed.  And you’ll sometimes see ten heads in a row.  That same coin gets flipped a billion times inside every sperm and egg cell.  __David