OCEANPORT – It was hot out during the heat wave but area activists didn’t care. Their aim was to put the heat on those involved with horse racing and to bring awareness to the grueling heat horses were enduring that day at Monmouth Park Racetrack.
The activists who came out from various animal rights organizations utilized mobile billboards in their protest against animal cruelty noting horse deaths at Monmouth Park during the Haskell Stakes. The rally was sponsored by Horseracing Wrongs.
Two mobile billboard trucks, part of the organization’s nationwide campaign, was on display outside Monmouth all day.
Horseracing Wrongs founder and president Patrick Battuello said the group was there to “remind people that the pomp and pageantry of horseracing is a ruse. In truth, racing’s core is ugly and mean. It is confinement and isolation, buying and selling, needles and syringes, bits and whips.”
Battuello’s group is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization working to end horseracing in the U.S.
“It is deadly,” he added. He noted that 141 horses have been killed at Monmouth Park since 2014 according to the New Jersey Racing Commission.
The most recent death was recorded on July 8, in the sixth race when 4-year-old Sip’n Dip fell, her body slamming into the metal railing multiple times.
Battuello said, “the typical horse lives 25-30 years; this poor animal was killed at four – for gambling and entertainment.”
Horseracing Wrongs has documented over 8,000 confirmed deaths since 2014; its research shows that well over 2,000 horses are killed at U.S. tracks annually suffering aortic rupture, pulmonary hemorrhage, blunt-force head trauma, broken necks, severed spines, ruptured ligaments, and shattered legs.
Battuello added, “what’s more, two independent studies indicate that most spent or simply no-longer-wanted racehorses, including, eventually, many of the ones who were racing at Monmouth that weekend, are brutally bled-out and butchered at “career’s” end – some 10,000-15,000 erstwhile “athletes” slaughtered annually.”
“In short, the U.S. horseracing industry is engaged in wholesale carnage – not hyperbole, carnage,” Battuello says. “We live in 21st century America; has not the time at long last arrived for us to put this shameful cruelty and killing behind us?”
Battuello has appeared on CNN, ESPN, on a segment on HBO Real Sports, The New Yorker and the Philadelphia Inquirer. He said he was able to help sway the Editorial Board of the Inquirer to call for an end to horseracing, in April 2021.
Battuello previously worked with The Washington Post, which in addition to its board also calling for an end to horseracing, The newspaper offered him his own stand-alone op-ed.
