Hollywood -- bad for horses

[csziggy]

7. I don't know race horses or the racing industry but horses are pretty fragile

We had one case of a horse who reared and fell over backwards, hitting her head on a door guide. We were very lucky that she was not hurt badly. She broke a bone at the top of her skull and had a pretty deep cut. The vet was sure we'd have an infection because there was no way for the wound to drain. Fortunately she healed fine with no lasting effects.

There was no warning of her rear - she went straight up and then overbalanced and went backwards. There was absolutely nothing we could have done to stop her.

In fact years later, when a colt reared while I was holding him and I instinctively held on to try to stop him, I ended up with severe damage to my rotator cuff. Eventually the entire rotator cuff had to be rebuilt - three of the tendons/ligaments were detached, two more were seriously damaged and the cartilage inside the joint was torn to shreds. The colt stopped going up when he felt like it, no as a result of my trying to stop him.

Both those incidents were young horses less than a year old, probably weighing about 500 pounds each. A full grown horse will weigh around twelve hundred pounds and will be significantly larger and stronger than the two youngsters I was dealing with.

Thoroughbreds, the breed that are most often race horses, are notoriously flighty. The ones used for racing are trained for one thing - to run fast. They don't tend to have a lot of sense and they have a lot of muscle power on a spindly skeleton.