There's a lot to this debate. When 'higher ups' at tracks keep up with the mantra 'we're all about safety' they put themselves in a teflon don position. How can you argue with someone who is looking out for animals?

I think the problem is that this stuff is a 'bandaid' for a larger, deeper problem. There are plenty of ways to skin a cat. I think that there are many things that racing commissions can do besides changing surfaces that have been basically neglected.

Who's to say that instead of spending millions on synthetic surfaces, they spend those same millions on prerace security (i.e 24 or 48 hour detention barns for every horse in every race every day)? Who can quantify which saves more lives? If the sport got rid of the cheats and we had horses who were NOT running on powerful painkillers, maybe we'd see what a lame horse looks like in the post parade instead of a flawed horse warming up on snake venom who's destined to break down in midsetretch.

What the Joe Harper's of the world are saying is this. "the safety of the horses comes first" but what they MEAN is, "we don't want horses breaking down in front of our young fans who might not come back if they see tragedy right before their eyes"

If the head honcho's of racetracks around this great country are REALLY concerned about creating the safest environment for horses, they need to start by putting a program in place to rid the game of drug cheats. Also, they need a rule on how many times a horse can race per month. There was a horse at Del Mar trained by Mike Marlow that broke down after having like 4 races in a month (not sure the exact numbers, but it was a lot of races in a short span).

There is a lot of contradiction and hypocritical behavior when on the one hand you say, "im all for safety of the animals thats why we spent millions on a softer racing surface' but then go permit trainers to enter flawed, cheap claimers more than 3 times per month in order to fill fields to create carryovers.

You can't have it both ways. If you are going to shout from the mountaintops about safety, i don't want to see a 9 year old horse with large front bandages racing 3 times in a 10 day span just so you can create larger fields to create carryovers.