My beloved friend Pancho is an off-track thoroughbred who has been with me for 24 years. In his youth, in the early 2000s, he soldiered through a vigorous mid-level career on the competitive tracks of Southern California. At nearly 28 now his life is approaching its natural end. Our life together riding trails has been the purest gift. But his slow decline forces me to face the unsettling possibility of euthanasia. It’s a decision that haunts me constantly, like a whispering djinn. Some days are good, some are not. Though I dread the day I may walk into the barn and he lets me know he needs my help to die I am consoled only by the dignity of his life. He’s privileged where many thoroughbreds of his day and thousands since were not. As it was back then, as it is now and will continue to be, for the young racehorse who dies on the track there is no dignity in the end.
As thoughts of Pancho’s creeping decline weighed on me, I took a job at a large equine hospital to fill gaps in my knowledge and learn how best to care for him as health problems arise. But after a while I admitted to myself that the more sincere reason I am there is to observe other horses die. It may sound dark or morbid, but it hardly compares with the deaths I’ve witnessed before: young racehorses with shattered legs or hearts that burst mid-stride, collapsing before an audience in the name of sport.
Since my work began at the clinic, I have held horses’ heads while they were humanely euthanized. A horse’s eyes and body are their complete language. I’ve learned that when a horse is ready to die, whether due to old age or prolonged pain and illness, they accept death, welcome it even, much as people do. These deaths are generally tranquil, “peaceful death”. The horse’s soul is ready to leave.
Sometimes though a horse is not ready to die. A young healthy horse may fight even as the overdose of bright pink barbiturates is pushed into their jugular. In the moments before their heart stops, they may stagger and set backwards. Their heads high and flight-ready, bodies braced stiff with fear, and eyes wide and wild before they drop to the ground dead. Some racetrack veterinarians administer a mild sedative prior to euthanasia, which works to confuse the mind and lessen the horse’s ability to physically respond to what’s happening to it. It is meant to relax the horse so that it accepts death with less fight. But this sedative is not designed to kill pain, and it takes time to have an effect, quite a bit more time in fact than euthanasia itself. For a horse who is exerted to the extreme from running and consumed by fear and pain, is more time spent standing on a broken leg ultimately more humane, especially considering the sedation makes standing precarious even for a horse on four good legs? When the death screen goes up around the doomed horse on the track, public inquiry stops. But the horse dies whether we see it or not. There is no humanity in taking an innocent horse’s life for a sport, so in the context of racing the term humane euthanasia doesn’t work.
None of this is to say that euthanasia is not, in many circumstances, an appropriate way to end an animal’s suffering. But how a horse gets there, and for what purpose, matters. In racing, the horses are not old or sick, and they have no agency in what happens to them. Their lives – unlike Pancho’s, lived fully into age and rest – are only just beginning. They wouldn’t die if not for the misfortune of being bred and made to run toward it. In the world of racing, euthanasia is used loosely, as a tool for managing a business. Insurance payouts are built into the calculus of ownership. It remains a fact that no other equine sport accepted by the public as civilized kills young, healthy horses at the obscene rate horse racing does. In a sense, the sport has hijacked the language of humane euthanasia to justify the unethical – an act of moral sleight of hand made necessary by an industry built on the exploitation of the young.
My heart will be crushed the day I say goodbye to Pancho and if it is humane euthanasia we face, in that tremendous decision I will make on his behalf, I will find peace knowing that he knows I do it from a place of true love and compassion.
And, believe me, they know.
Elizabeth Banicki worked for two decades as an exercise rider in the horse racing industry.
