 | | |  Dear Anne,
"[A] brutal game that grinds up young horses."
That's what a prominent sports columnist in last week's New York Times called a horseracing industry that promotes the breeding of thousands of thoroughbred horses—half of whom will meet their end at slaughterhouses in Mexico, Canada, or Japan.
PETA is leading the fight to help these horses by urging the industry to adopt our Thoroughbred 360 Lifecycle Retirement Fund, a plan that we developed to help provide care for horses cast off when owners and trainers no longer find these beautiful animals "useful." Won't you support our efforts to help horses and all animals by making a special donation to PETA right now?
PETA's vital campaigns to help horses grew rapidly following the tragic death of Eight Belles at the Kentucky Derby a little more than three years ago.
Thanks in part to the groundbreaking work of PETA, our work to help race horses has really paid off. In the U.S., a landmark bill banning all drugs for racehorses has been introduced, and the thoroughbred industry has proposed major reforms, including the use of air-cushioned whips (which cause less pain), a prohibition on racing horses before they reach the age of 24 months, mandatory emergency veterinary care on the track, third-party drug testing, and much more. Churchill Downs was the first racetrack in America to implement all these reforms, and others are following suit.
Yet as important as these hard-won improvements are, they don't address an even more massive source of horse deaths than injury or death on the track—the 20,000 thoroughbreds who will be discarded by the racing industry this year. Rather than retiring to live the rest of their days in a sunny pasture, approximately half of these horses will be hacked-up in slaughterhouses and sold as meat.
The Thoroughbred 360 Lifecycle Retirement Fund is PETA's proposal to The Jockey Club—the only racing body that deals with every owner of a thoroughbred racehorse—to help horses facing slaughter. Right now, there is no formal program in place to care for horses when the racing industry no longer considers them productive on the track or in the breeding shed. PETA is asking that horse owners and breeders be required to pay a $360 fee for every new foal registration, ownership transfer, or stallion or broodmare registration. From our estimates, this fund could generate more than $20 million every year to help retire racehorses rather than slaughter them.
Adopting this lifesaving fund is a small expense when horse owners routinely pay more than $100,000 in "stud fees" to thoroughbred owners whose stallions are expected to "cover" sometimes more than 100 mares in a single breeding season. Not one dollar from these stud fees is typically committed to the cost of looking out for horses once they are cast off by the racing industry.
By making a special gift right now, you will be supporting all PETA's lifesaving campaigns for animals, such as our vital efforts to establish the Thoroughbred 360 Lifecycle Retirement Fund.
For everything that you do for animals—including helping horses discarded by the racing industry—thank you for your compassion and support.
Kind regards,
Ingrid E. Newkirk
President
P.S. Horses like Coming Home, who PETA helped save just hours before she was to be shipped to slaughter, are depending on compassionate people like you and me to let them live their days in a loving environment rather than condemning them to the horror of a slaughterhouse. Please give what you can to help PETA's lifesaving work for all animals right now. | | | |  |  |
This e-mail was sent by PETA, 501 Front St., Norfolk, VA 23510 USA.
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