There is a beautiful column on the front page of the sports section of the Thursday, May 25, New York Times, headed, "An Unknown Filly Dies, And the Crowd Just Shrugs."
Columnist William C. Rhoden opens with:
"There was no array of photographers at Belmont Park yesterday, no sobbing in the crowd as a badly injured superstar horse tried to stay erect on three legs. There was no national spotlight.
"Instead, there was death. In the seventh race at Belmont, a 4-year-old filly named Lauren's Charm headed into the homestretch. As she began to fade in the mile-and-an-eighth race on the grass, her jockey, Fernando Jara, felt her struggling, pulled up and jumped off.
"As the race concluded, Lauren's Charm collapsed. No one, except those associated with the horse and two track veterinarians, seemed to notice.
"The scene was in stark contrast to what unfolded at Pimlico last Saturday when the Kentucky Derby winner, Barbaro, severely fractured his ankle in the opening burst of the Preakness. A national audience gasped; an armada of rescuers rushed to the scene. In the days that followed, as the struggle to keep Barbaro alive took full shape, there was an outpouring of emotion across the country and heartfelt essays about why we care so much about these animals.
"But I'm not so sure we do, and I'm not so sure the general public fully understands this sport. When people attempt to rationalize the uneasy elements of racing, they often say: 'That's part of the business. That's the game.'
"But there was nothing beautiful or gracious or redeeming about the seventh race at Belmont. This was the underside of the business. The nuts-and-bolts part, where animals are expendable parts of a billion-dollar industry."
Lauren's Charm had died of an heart-attack. Rhoden tells us,
"Horses go down much more frequently than the general public realizes, and many in the business have noted that had Barbaro not been the winner of the Kentucky Derby, he might have been destroyed after being injured."
He ends his column with:
"One animal breaks an ankle on national television in a Triple Crown race and sets off a national outpouring of emotion. A 4-year-old collapses and dies in full view on a sunny afternoon and not many seem to notice. Or care.
"As they say, it's the business.
"But what kind of business is this?"
The whole piece is available free on line to New York Times or "Times Select" subscribers at http://select.nytimes.com/2006/05/25/sports/othersports/25rhoden.html . Those who don't subscribe can sign up for a free 14-day trial or check out the print version of today's New York Times, available in most big cities across the US.
You can send sports columnist William C. Rhoden appreciative notes at wcr@nytimes.com
Or you can send a letter to the editor at letters@nytimes.com
Yours and the animals',
Karen Dawn
(DawnWatch is an animal advocacy media watch that looks at animal issues in the media and facilitates one-click responses to the relevant media outlets. You can learn more about it, and sign up for alerts at http://www.DawnWatch.com. To unsubscribe, go to http://www.dawnwatch.com/cgi-bin/dada/dawnwatch_unsubscribe.cgi If you forward or reprint DawnWatch alerts, please do so unedited -- leave DawnWatch in the title and include this tag line.)
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Date: Thu May 25 19:29:59 2006
