Santa Anita started the season worried about horse safety and finished the meeting with equal concerns about equine and human safety
Strictly Biz, a 4-year-old colt, sustained a knee fracture during a race and was euthanized, becoming Santa Anita’s 15th fatality of the meeting.
“Horse deaths have never been acceptable,” Butler said. “But people [at Santa Anita] really made it a mission to make sure it wasn’t acceptable. A lot of things that [Stronach chief executive Belinda Stronach] put on the list have been done, such as reform on Lasix, transparency and shock-wave therapy. But there is much work to do and I’m confident we can improve on it.”
The Equine Injury Database, which compiles statistics nationally, last year gave Santa Anita a rating of 3.01 deaths for every 1,000 starts, a very high number that also includes the one-month fall meeting. This meeting has a rating of 1.26, although metrics in this database do not include training deaths.One area that has plagued all of California racing is the shrinking horse population.
Butler, despite calling this a “hellish” year and saying Santa Anita was deep in the red financially, said that there was no reason to believe the track is in trouble or in danger of going away. “We have a lot of support from our corporate office, which is really committed to racing,” Butler said. “If we had been shut down indefinitely it might have been different.”
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