OPINION

By William C. Rhoden

updated 11:20 a.m. ET May 1, 2009

Thoroughbred racing will hold its breath Saturday as the nation tunes in to the 135th running of the Kentucky Derby.

Since Barbaro’s breakdown in the 2006 Preakness and the stunning track-side euthanasia of Eight Belles at last year’s Derby, the racing industry has been under scrutiny for everything from raceday medication to track surfaces, toe grabs and the use of whips.

But in-competition breakdowns, dramatic as they are, account for only a fraction of the total deaths generated by the industry. The most significant source of racehorse deaths is the slaughter industry, one driven by overbreeding and demand from the lucrative global meat market. According to the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, more than 100,000 American horses are slaughtered each year in Canada and Mexico to satisfy horse meat markets in Europe and Asia.

The slaughter of domestically bred horses represents a breach of the American covenant between horses and humans: horses bred for sport, industry and agriculture are not part of our food chain. They are not supposed to meet death in a slaughterhouse.

Breeding operations produce thousands of so-called surplus thoroughbreds. What happens to the excess, the often anonymous horses? Some are sold to owners who take them overseas. Some wind up racing in Japan. Some wind up in slaughterhouses.

According to Equine Advocates, a rescue group in Chatham, N.Y., the business of horse racing is a major contributor to the slaughter industry. Of all the horses slaughtered in Canada and Mexico every year, the group estimates that roughly one-third come from horse racing.

Alex Waldrop, president and chief executive of the National Thoroughbred Racing Association, rejected that overbreeding was to blame but acknowledged that slaughter was an issue. “The prices that are being paid by foreign entities who want horse meat is what’s driving slaughter, not the oversupply of horses,” Waldrop said.

This year an undercover investigator from People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals went inside Japan’s largest horse slaughterhouse and filmed a young thoroughbred’s final moments before being slaughtered. The video is disturbing. It shows in graphic terms what happens to the unfortunate thoroughbreds who become spare parts in a contracting industry.

How could a thoroughbred come to such a gruesome end? Easier than you think.

In 2002 Ferdinand, the 1986 Kentucky Derby winner, was slaughtered in Japan. Since Ferdinand’s death, an estimated 2,000 more American thoroughbreds have been exported to Japan. How many of those wound up in slaughterhouses is not known.

In 1982 Arthur Hancock had a lifelong dream fulfilled when his horse, Gato Del Sol, won the Kentucky Derby. Gato was not successful as a stud, and in 1993 Hancock sold his Derby winner to a farm in Germany for $100,000.

“I’ve got six children looking for one person to feed them,” Hancock said. “I hated to sell him, but you’ve got to make a living. I had a partner who wanted to sell him. I figured he’d have a good home in Germany.”

Gato’s career as a stallion did not improve in Europe. Then Hancock’s wife, Staci, learned that Exceller, a top handicap horse who had been sold to stud in Sweden, was killed in a slaughterhouse. “The story made my heart stop,” she recalled in a phone interview on Wednesday. “If a champion horse like Exceller could end up in a slaughterhouse in Europe, the same fate could be in store for Gato.”

In 1999 Hancock reacquired Gato Del Sol and brought him back to Stone Farm, where he died at age 28.

If a prominent fourth-generation breeder can sell one of his Derby winners overseas, imagine what goes on at the lowest rungs of the industry.

Many owners, faced with the choice of keeping retired horses and continuing to pay for their feed and care, instead opt to sell them at auction for $300 to $500 a horse, either not realizing or not caring that if they are exported they can eventually be slaughtered.

“We’ve got lots of work to do here,” Waldrop said. “The problem is far from being solved. There is a high demand for horse meat around the world, and they create a market for horses that competes with our efforts to adopt and retrain these horses.”

The last of the horse slaughterhouses in the United States were shut down in 2007. But at least four states — Montana, Illinois, and North Dakota and Tennessee — have either proposed or contemplated legislation to reintroduce horse slaughter. Two bills stuck in committee in the House and the Senate would make it illegal to transport horses across state lines or to foreign countries for the purpose of slaughter. The industry should push Congress to pass pending anti-slaughter legislation.

No one expects owners to stop selling their horses to foreign breeders. But at the very least there should be provisions that allow them to buy back the horse or arrange for euthanasia as an alternative to slaughter.

A sport that refers to its animals as athletes shouldn’t send them to slaughter.

This industry desperately needs an infusion of ethics and backbone and legislation so that it can uphold our covenant with the American thoroughbred.

This article, “When the Races Are Over, an Uncertain Fate,” first appeared in The New York Times.