“We’re still in the process of gathering information,” he said. “The more reasonable approach would be to wait until all the facts are known and then offer reasonable suggestions rather than jump to conclusions that make assumptions about the industry and our willingness and ability to change.”

Racing leaders are unlikely to seriously consider several of PETA's demands.

Banning racing of horses until their third birthday, for example, would force major changes to racing's top event, the Kentucky Derby, since trainers would have little time to prepare their horses for the extremely demanding 1 1/4-mile distance.

And the elimination of racing horses at the age of 2 could even be counterproductive, as some research has shown that bone "modeling" — the development and healing of microscopic cracks caused by early training and racing — actually strengthen bones.

But adoption of synthetic racing surfaces, which PETA flatly states are safer than dirt surfaces, already is generating much debate within the industry.

Jim Pendergest, general manager of Polytrack, one of a handful of companies marketing artificial racing surfaces, agrees with that assessment.

“We do say it’s safer and we believe the statistics back that up,” he said. “Polytrack is on five tracks in the U.S. and five in the U.K. … and in all cases it has reduced catastrophic injuries by close to 50 percent,” he said.

But some in the racing industry say that it is premature to make that assertion, despite data presented at a racing summit in March that showed 1.47 fatalities per 1,000 starts on synthetic racing surfaces vs. 2.3 fatalities per 1,000 on dirt.

The NTRA’s Waldrop says that statistic oversimplifies the safety question.

“The data does suggest that synthetic tracks are safer, but whether an individual Polytrack is safer than, say, Churchill’s track, we don’t know,” he said. “I would not want to draw conclusions about Churchill’s track based on data that is drawn on the macro level.”

And Bob Fierro, a horse owner whose DataTrack company analyzes equine biomechanics to advise buyers looking for an efficient-striding horse at 2-year-old training sales, said that of the seven tracks that hold such sales — four of which have synthetic surfaces and three of which are dirt — the dirt racetrack at Fairplex is almost universally regarded as the best.

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“There is no data, no body of evidence for anything like that being claimed by the so-called animal experts,” he said. “I don’t want to take on PETA, but they just don’t have any idea what they’re talking about.”

Even Dr. Wayne McIlwraith, a respected equine orthopedic surgeon and director of Colorado State University’s Orthopaedic Research Center who says the early data clearly shows that synthetic tracks “decrease the catastrophic injury rate as well as bone injuries,” cautions that it’s too soon to draw firm conclusions.

“That’s based on less than a year’s data and it’s hard to statistically proclaim that they are the answer,” he said. “We’re not at the point where we can say, ‘You’ve got to have a synthetic track,’ because we’ve seen that a poorly maintained synthetic track is not as safe as a properly maintained dirt track.”