As the end of this long, strange year approaches, I'm sure you're getting them too. My mailbox is overflowing with them – solicitations from every nonprofit I've ever bought a calendar from, making one last pitch for year-end giving. Among them for me (and probably for you) will be lots of requests from Thoroughbred aftercare organizations. As the owner of an off-track Thoroughbred, I'm happy to do whatever I can to support them. How can you not feel good about giving to charity?
The thing is, this particular cause shouldn't be so reliant on charity.
Last year, before the pandemic hobbled fundraising and operations for many non-profits, I wrote a three-part series about what is and isn't working in Thoroughbred aftercare. (You can find it here, here, and here.) It was clear then that while we have come a long way as an industry in the infrastructure and funding dedicated to this cause, the enormity of the problem dwarfs the solutions we've come up with so far. One of the biggest hurdles has always been paying for the care of horses permanently retired or the temporary care, assessment and training of horses waiting to go to a good home.
The racing industry has grappled with this, setting up voluntary check-off funding programs and more recently implementing a few mandatory ones. It's generally believed that everyone who benefits financially from a racehorse's life cycle should chip in to his retirement, but in lieu of serious mandatory funding mechanisms delineating how this should be done, people spend a lot of time 1) justifying why it's someone else's problem to solve or 2) crying poverty.
I was fortunate enough to enter the racing world under the tutelage of Virginia owner/breeder Nellie Cox, who took aftercare seriously long before it became a national discussion. Cox was lucky in that she had the space to retire horses onto her properties in Goochland and Cumberland Counties if suitable homes couldn't be found for them. Her daughter Lisa put training into many before selling them on to homes as eventers, foxhunters, or show jumpers. She never thought she owed them anything less and that's what I grew up believing the role of a breeder was supposed to be – a sense of stewardship for your land, for your bloodlines, for the horses. Stewardship doesn't expire when a colt is gelded or a horse is sold or a mare fails to produce. That's the point of it.
I agree that everyone who uses a horse during its racing life should bear some responsibility for the horse's safe delivery to a home after racing. But I am not afraid to say the thing that I'm pretty sure people in high places don't want me to: it's the breeder who decides a horse should exist, and who spends thousands of dollars to bring about that existence. It's time they be required to take more meaningful responsibility for that existence after the horse has expended its usefulness to them.
I'm not the first person to think of this. In 2011, the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) sent a letter to The Jockey Club proposing a $360 mandatory retirement fee be paid at the time of a foal registration, along with a $360 fee for ownership transfers to fund aftercare. This, the organization pointed out, is less than $1 a day and is (I'm pointing out) less than the minimum bid at any of the major Thoroughbred auctions in this country. It also pointed to the appallingly low participation in voluntary programs available at the time – in 2010, the letter claimed voluntary foal registration contributions totaled $43,000 from 30,000 registrations.
Of course there are now mandatory programs – breeders must now pay $25 for each report of a mare bred and $25 for each foal registration. (For context, $25 buys about a bag of grain.) Earlier this year, Fasig-Tipton and Keeneland announced their voluntary checkoff programs would become mandatory – but only for sellers, who would be charged 0.05% on each sale. The auction houses would continue to pay 0.05% on each sale, and buyers would be given the choice to opt out of paying 0.05% of each horse's sale price to aftercare. (That's $50 from the seller and $50 from the auction house on the sale of a $100,000 horse.)
The trouble is, when one funding stream becomes mandatory, those who had opted in to voluntary programs often opt back out of them, so the total amount of cash coming in doesn't change as much as you would hope. In some cases, farms that previously committed to a percentage of the stud fee for each mare bred have eliminated that and actually pay less in aftercare funding under the current system.
How is the system currently working to address the needs of aftercare organizations? Let's take a look at the best-case scenario in a random selection of real-life cases. For the purposes of this study, I'll be generous. I'll assume that the people in the horse's journey have opted in to voluntary funding programs, and I'll also add the numbers based on programs and percentages of December 2020, even though they may have been different or absent when today's horses were bred, foaled or sold.
As I write this, it's late on Dec. 28. If I randomly select a handful of entrants in upcoming races in the major racing states – New York, Kentucky, and Florida – I should have some idea how much an average group of horses generates for the aftercare system.
The next racing card in New York will be on Dec. 31. The first runner in the first race at Aqueduct that day is Hail Da King. If the current funding mechanisms had been in place at the time of his birth in 2017, he would have put $25 into the system at his conception and another $25 at the time of his registration for a total of $50. He has not sold through public auction, so he did not contribute there. He's never started before, so he also hasn't contributed via New York's mandatory $10 per start program yet. If he were claimed from this race, 1.5% of his claiming price will be automatically donated to aftercare.
Total: $50
All right, he's a maiden claimer – bad example? Let's look at Race 2. The first horse we come to there is Ok Honey, a 4-year-old who also hasn't gone through the auction ring, but she has made her entire career in New York – 42 starts so far. That means the horsemen gave $10 for each of those starts, on top of the $50 her breeders gave when she was conceived and registered.
Total: $470
What about another state? Let's look at Kentucky, where Turfway Park is also running Dec. 31. The first horse on the day is Irish-bred Mila's Dream. Mila's Dream was born and sold twice in Ireland, so no contributions there. She has run twice in California, once in Illinois, and three times in West Virginia. In California, she might have contributed through CARMA, which is an opt-out program. If her jockey, owner and trainer all remained opted in to the program, then .03% of the purse money she earned there would be donated to aftercare. She earned $19,860 in California, so that would be $5.96 total. Her start at Arlington generated a $1 donation from the Illinois Thoroughbred Horsemen's Association. Her start in Kentucky will generate a $5 donation from the Kentucky horsemen to aftercare, which Turfway Park will match.
Total: $16.96
Ok, ok – surely we can apply the new mandatory sale donation programs to a current runner and see those totals go up, right? Let's switch to Florida, where a lot of young horses get their starts and where a lot of big commercial stables are wintering right now.
The first runner at Gulfstream Park on Dec. 31 is actually Sister Is Devil, who some readers may remember from a heartfelt piece by our own Chelsea Hackbarth in October 2019. I did not know she was entered on this date, but I looked at the first races on the other two cards so will analyze her as well. She has run six times previously, all in Florida, where the Florida HBPA provides a monthly contribution to aftercare based on a percentage of the purses given out that month. It's not immediately clear to me what the rate is per horse; let's be generous and say it's $10 per start. She went through the sale ring twice – selling for $2,000 as a short yearling and $11,000 at Keeneland September. Assuming everyone involved opted in to aftercare contributions at both sales, that would have generated .15% of each sale price, or $3 and $16.50 respectively.
Total = $129.50
This is far from a scientific inquiry. Of course, the entrants early on a weekday card will have generated less in purses and sale fees than Saturday horses. But we also have more weekday horses in this sport than we do Saturday horses – a lot more. And the Saturday horses probably have a greater chance of going on to breeding careers where aftercare won't be necessary. (I must concede here that experts estimate about 30 percent of Thoroughbreds who race will go on to breeding careers, so some horses whose connections pay into the aftercare system will never need it.)
How do those estimated totals stack up to the need?
When I was doing research on aftercare costs for my series last year, the executive director of one organization estimated the living and care costs for retired horses is $300 to $400 a month, or $3,600 to $4,800 per year. For horses that need retraining and adoption, monthly costs are higher but their stays are shorter. At New Vocations, for example, there's board, training and veterinary work to think about, and even a quick adoption can cost the organization $750 or $1,000 at minimum. That's assuming the horse is healthy and needs no rehabilitation time from an injury, that vet work to assess the horse's condition is minimal, and the horse can be marketed, the adopter vetted, and the horse picked up in less than four weeks. It also assumes the horse is conformationally correct enough to attract an adopter and has no serious mental or physical limitations for its next career. Horses who don't fit these qualifications (and many, many do not) will cost more.
The Thoroughbred Aftercare Alliance is doing the work it was created to do – accrediting nonprofits, promoting ex-racehorses, and raising funds. It's just that the need is growing faster than the money, because key stakeholders don't want to pony up. (Wondering who? See who's absent from the TAA's supporters list.)
The current system isn't working. It's time The Jockey Club stopped asking the industry's most powerful stakeholders to be kind. It's time our breed registry required them to become good stewards.
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