From Sunday’s New York Times:

Mangled Horses, Maimed Jockeys

The new economics of horse racing are making an always-dangerous game even more so, as lax oversight puts animal and rider at risk.

Nut grafs:

On average, 24 horses die each week at racetracks across America. Many are inexpensive horses racing with little regulatory protection in pursuit of bigger and bigger prizes. These deaths often go unexamined, the bodies shipped to rendering plants and landfills rather than to pathologists who might have discovered why the horses broke down.

In 2008, after a Kentucky Derby horse, Eight Belles, broke two ankles on national television and was euthanized, Congress extracted promises from the racing industry to make its sport safer. While safety measures like bans on anabolic steroids have been enacted, assessing their impact has been difficult because many tracks do not keep accurate accident figures or will not release them.

But an investigation by The New York Times has found that industry practices continue to put animal and rider at risk. A computer analysis of data from more than 150,000 races, along with injury reports, drug test results and interviews, shows an industry still mired in a culture of drugs and lax regulation and a fatal breakdown rate that remains far worse than in most of the world.

The Times devotes three full pages to this story – which in newspaper real estate terms is pretty much California. It also include comprehensive graphs like this:

A Survey of Horse Deaths

More than 3,000 horses died during racing or training from 2009-11 according to a New York Times survey of 29 racing states.Highlighted states do not require pre-race inspections of horses and do not perform post-mortem inspections on horses that die while racing or training.

STATE	DRUG POSITIVES	DEATHS
Arizona	107	50*
Arkansas	13	No data
California	296	635
Colorado	68	14
Delaware	53	90
Florida	366	150-160*
Idaho	No data	No data
Illinois	171	140
Indiana	58	65
Iowa	50	46
Kentucky	258	86
Louisiana	291	268
Maryland	69	79
Massachusetts	14	53
Michigan	71	14
Minnesota	222	34
Montana	5	10
Nebraska	64	47
New Jersey	105	106
New Mexico	115	349
New York	159	366
Ohio	406	122
Oklahoma	149	119
Oregon	64	45
Pennsylvania	195	243
Texas	168	108
Virginia	38	20
Washington	21	60
West Virginia	210	233

* Estimates. Actual practice and adherence to regulatory requirements varies widely from state to state.

Memo to mainstream-media haters like Jeff Jarvis: Who is going to provide this kind of investigative reporting when “the gatekeepers” are gone the way you want them to be?

Morons like you?