PETA gallops into the fray and gets it wrong - again

ONCE again, PETA has it wrong.

When Eight Belles tragically snapped both ankles and was euthanized after her second-place finish in Saturday's Kentucky Derby, the Norfolk-based animal rights group sprung into misguided over-reaction, rabidly denouncing horse racing and anyone who enjoys it.

"Attending the Derby is as despicable as attending a dogfight," declared Ingrid E. Newkirk, the president of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, in a letter to Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton.

(The Democratic presidential hopeful joked last week that she was pulling for the filly and wanted daughter Chelsea, who was going to the Derby, to put some money on Eight Belles.)

Horse racing is as bad as dog fighting? Please.

"Your public support of horseracing - and specifically betting on Eight Belles - makes you culpable in her destruction," Newkirk wrote.

Sheesh.

"Races like this are the equivalent of child sweatshops," Newkirk asserted in a quinella of outrageous exaggeration.

Is anyone surprised?

After all, PETA is an organization that was indifferent to violence in the Middle East until 2003, when a donkey died in an explosion. That prompted Newkirk to pen a polite letter to Yasser Arafat, begging him to "leave the animals out of this conflict."

I'm betting that if jockey Gabriel Saez had fallen off Eight Belles and was trampled to death by thundering hooves, the same activists who are so outraged over the animal's death would have figured the little guy got what he deserved for riding a horse.

You don't have to be an animal rights extremist to be heartsick over the death at the Derby. Those of us who love thoroughbred racing don't want to see the astonishing animals die. We want to see them do what they do best: run.

The breakdown of Eight Belles, just two years after Barbaro's awful injury at the Preakness, is deeply disturbing. Experts are asking whether Americans race horses too young and on the wrong kinds of tracks. Some wonder whether genetics are the root of these problems.

In a prescient piece last week in The Wall Street Journal, Jon Weinbach pointed out that all 20 horses in the Derby could trace their ancestry to Native Dancer.

"His bloodline's greatest asset is that it consistently produces precocious, speedy thoroughbreds that domi-

nate the Derby and other

Triple Crown events... (yet) Native Dancer's line has a tragic

flaw. Thanks in part to heavily muscled legs and a violent, herky-jerky running style, Native Dancer and his descendents have trouble with their feet. Injuries have cut short the careers of several of his most famous kin..."

Even if breeders bolster the bloodlines, horse racing will be dangerous.

"If human athletes were euthanized on television every time one broke a leg or a neck in an accident, the National Football League, NASCAR and Olympic skiing would be out of business," wrote horse breeder Jim Squires for The New York Times online.

Squires, who knows a thing or two about horses, says it's the nature of the beast that often leads to injuries.

"Horses break their legs running across pastures with no one on their backs," Squires said. "Whether wild or domesticated, they race with one another and often try so hard they hurt themselves. They run through fences. They kick each other regularly, often breaking their own legs.... Horses who never saw a racetrack in their lives founder regularly from mysterious causes and end up like Barbaro."

With Saturday's horror fresh in horse lovers' minds, this is a good time to address safety at American racetracks.

PETA isn't helping. When its leaders equate horse racing with dog fighting, they make themselves look lame.

Kerry Dougherty, (757) 446-2306, kerry.dougherty@cox.net