April 30, 2024 • 62 mins
Welcome to Inscape Quest, a compelling podcast where we provide an intriguing insight into the world of horse racing. Today we have two trailblazing women, retired jockey and sport analyzer for NBC Sports, Donna Barton Brothers, and former jockey, racing manager and consultant, Euki Binns. Both with experience and remarkable equestrian backgrounds, they delve into their personal journey, the sport's dynamics, and their invariable passion for these majestic creatures.
In this episode, they discuss their experiences as female jockeys in the traditionally male-dominated sport. They highlight how women involvement has evolved over the years, and how they overcame personal and professional challenges. Beyond horse racing, this episode is a conversation about the pursuit of passion, breaking barriers, and making a meaningful impact in unique ways.
This dialogue goes beyond the glitz and glamour to explore the serious issue of horse welfare in racing. The speakers mention media misrepresentation, compare perceptions and realities of horse welfare, argue for better care of these majestic animals, and discuss the significant strides made towards reducing horse injuries. Leveraging technology and data is also a focal point, with emphasis on how predictive software like Stride Safe aids in injury prediction and prevention.
Furthermore, they debunk myths surrounding medication usage in horse racing, reiterating that accidents or breakdowns are often not a result of inhumane treatment or medication misuse. They commend the work of the Horse Racing Integrity and Safety Authority in ensuring fair play and thorough testing for a broad spectrum of drugs in the sport.
This episode also touches on the positive impact of horses on the economy, recreational spaces, therapy, and how horses have been notably successful in treating PTSD in veterans. Here we uncover the profound bond between humans and horses, its beneficial impact on mental well-being and its important role in maintaining green spaces.
Join us as we uncover the realities and debunk the myths surrounding horse racing. Explore the nuances of the equestrian world and understand the importance of horse welfare and safety. This episode is all about taking the reins and embarking on an informative and thrilling journey into the world of horse racing and equine welfare.
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Episode Transcript
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(00:00):
Welcome to InScape Quests, where insightful conversations redefine perspectives.
I'm your host, Trudy Howley.
Join me as together we delve into discussions about relationships,
work, and passions, unlocking profound insights that may shape our lives.
This is InScape Quests, where the journey within meets the quest for understanding.
(00:30):
Welcome to this next episode of the Horsepower with Heart series.
Today we delve deep into the world of horse racing with two remarkable women
who were born into the sport.
I'm delighted to introduce Donna Barton Brothers and Yuki Binns,
both with illustrious backgrounds intertwined with the hoofbeats of champions.
(00:51):
Donna Barton Brothers retired as the second leading female jockey in the United
States and now lends her expertise as a sports analyst and commentator for NBC Sports.
Not only is she a certified Bikram yoga teacher, she also dedicates her time
to serving the community, sitting on the boards of the Brain Injury Alliance
(01:13):
of Kentucky, the Thoroughbred Aftercare and Backside Learning Center.
Joining Donna is Yuki Binns, a third-generation horseman whose journey into
racing spans across various roles,
from former jockey to assistant trainer and racing manager for high-profile
owners and trainers in the U.S.
(01:34):
Beyond the racetrack, Yuki works behind the scenes while running her own training
and consulting business, Adaptive Development EQ.
Her passion lies in equine nutrition, injury rehabilitation,
rehabilitation and training development.
Together, Donna and Yuki take us on a fascinating exploration of topics surrounding
(01:56):
horse racing and horses in general.
Get ready to gallop through an engaging conversation filled with insights,
expertise and a shared love for these majestic creatures.
Welcome Donna and Yuki. I'm really delighted to be having this conversation with the two of you.
Thanks, Trudy. It's good to be here. Yeah, it's good to be with you, Trudy. Thank you.
(02:19):
We have so many different things we can talk about today.
I would really love to start.
The beginning because both of you have this amazing history as being female jockeys.
And before that, both of you had mothers that were jockeys as well.
And I'm so intrigued to hear about how you got started in the sport of horse racing.
(02:47):
I'm going to let Yuki start because her story of her mother being a jockey in
Japan is fascinating to me every time I hear it.
So my My grandfather, he owned racehorses. He was very passionate about the
sport to the point where he tried to build racetracks in other countries to
stimulate economic growth and modernization.
And so for my mother, it was very natural for her to start getting on horses,
(03:12):
which eventually led to her riding his racehorses and racing as well. And she was successful.
She rode a Chukyo racecourse in Nagoya. And I think that was definitely a big
influence for me, for my own riding career, my own sports career,
hearing her stories growing up with that she rode in the late 50s, early 60s.
(03:33):
And I think at that time, it was an anomaly. There were no women in racing in Japan at that time.
And I think even in the U.S., it was not until maybe the late 60s,
like Diane Krall, your mother, that were the barrier breakers here in the States.
And then in Japan, maybe 1996 or thereabouts, was the first female jockey that
(03:55):
was licensed under the JRA. Okay.
So I grew up in thoroughbred horse racing. My mother was one of the first half-dozen
women to be licensed as a jockey in the United States. That was in 1969.
The first license went to Kathy Kustner, who rode for the U.S.
Olympics show jumping team.
And she just happened to be the first female who challenged the rule,
(04:17):
which really was essentially a rule that was no longer valid after the Civil
Rights Act, but nobody had really challenged it in a court system yet. she challenged it.
32nd decision by the judge. Women could be licensed as a jockey.
Before Kathy could be the first female rider to ride a race,
she broke her leg in a show jumping incident.
(04:39):
And so she did end up riding races, but she wasn't the first to do it.
She's the first to get licensed. But my mother started riding in 1969.
I was born in 66. So this was always a part of my life.
And then she, by 1970, was the leading female jockey in the United States and
held that distinction for all the years that she rode.
And in fact, until four years after she retired, it wasn't until 1988 that Patty
(05:03):
Cooksey and Julie Crone went past her record.
But my point to all of that is that we had horses growing up,
but we didn't do specifically show jumping or dressage or anything like that.
We just always had horses and we had land and we would go out and ride.
And then when I started riding professionally, I'm going to say,
was galloping horses when I was 17 years old, thoroughbreds.
(05:25):
And it's so much different than just regular riding that you have to learn how to do it.
So I went to a farm in Louisville, Kentucky, Jack Van Virg's farm.
I learned how to gallop thoroughbreds. It requires an awful lot of strength
and also just a much deeper understanding of.
Trying to keep horses relaxed because the horses that we grew up riding,
(05:46):
we were trying to keep them energized, not so much relaxed.
We had old, just old horses, mostly retired from the racetrack,
some of the pony horses, companion horses.
But in any event, a lot of people in other disciplines, I think frown on thoroughbred
riding dynamics because we don't use a lot of leg and we don't use the same
(06:07):
sort of training tools that they use in other disciplines,
but that's because because jockeys ride with their irons very short.
And if we teach thoroughbreds to respond to leg cues and then you throw a jockey
on them and what they know is leg cues, that is just wasted information.
And so they're just trained a little bit differently than average riding horses.
(06:28):
But the thing that I've always appreciated about Yuki is that she has a really
good understanding of all of it.
I think it's interesting that Donna, you said your mother was the leading female
jockey and Yuki, your mother was the, only jockey, only female jockey in Japan.
And I think the only female on the racetrack as well.
(06:49):
How has that piece influenced you?
She was obviously some kind of role model. And also, I know that she quit the industry as well.
That's right. I think one big thing was the strength that shows through in the
way that she talks to me about that time.
She was eventually forced out the other jockeys didn't want to ride against
(07:13):
a woman and it was an unhappiness for her but she also was in school at the
time she was studying for the bar exam.
So I guess you could say there's some ladies here in contrast that continue
to push the women here in the U.S.
Then that's where the barrier breaking really actually happens.
(07:36):
So for me, I think it helped give me confidence at the time that I was riding.
I think it was tough for women.
I know in the time that Donna was riding is even tougher. In the time of her
mother, it was even tougher than that.
So I had that as a preface of, yeah, I know it's going to be tough.
But it's not going to be as tough as the women that came before me, for sure.
(07:57):
So that helps in terms of confidence. And at the time, I had people like Donna
and Julie Crone and these other
just amazing riders, amazing female riders that I really looked up to.
They definitely helped guide and influence my choices, how I trained.
Does that training is that training different from
(08:20):
how a man would train or how about my diet do I need to be a little cleaner
or things like that I think really had a positive impact on me that the mentorship
any time you're in any athletic endeavor I think it was a huge thing and I was
definitely fortunate to have that.
Trudy the only thing I'm going to say about that by the way is that while it
(08:41):
is a tough sport it's tough for everybody it's not just tough for the females
it's It's a tough sport to get a foothold in.
As an apprentice jockey, you don't have the experience. So what you have is
the weight advantage, which is different than most disciplines, right?
If you are new to dressage or new to eventing, they're not going to give you
a five-pound weight advantage over the experienced riders.
(09:03):
So at least in thoroughbred racing, all the apprentices do get a weight advantage.
And that's how you start to work your way into the doors of different barns.
But my mother, I've always said that if she ever experienced anything like discrimination,
she never gave it a voice.
And so when I started riding in 1987, professionally.
It just really never crossed my mind that there would be any sort of discrimination based on gender.
(09:27):
And so I never focused on it. But I remember, in fact, once meeting a trainer
named Wilson Brown in Minnesota, my agent and I went by his barn and he said,
nice of you to stop by young lady, but I don't ride women or actually said girls.
And I said, sir, it's a pleasure to meet you too.
And I don't ride like a girl. Why don't you just watch me?
And the next Next day, I beat one of his horses by a nose on the wire and I
(09:52):
stopped by his barn and he said, you're right.
So whatever that means, it typically means a rider who's not a strong finisher.
And I knew plenty of guys who were not strong finishers.
And so it just took a matter of showing people that you could compete at that level.
I also worked out in the gym with a lot of the jockeys that I rode with.
So they knew I could lift what they could lift, if not more. so they
(10:14):
couldn't say that i wasn't as strong as they were which is
the other advantage of this sport for from
a equestrian standpoint is that we all weigh the same i'm pretty close to the
same right so as opposed to other sports like baseball or football or basketball
where the men clearly have a size advantage i think that they're for my personal
(10:37):
experience i felt like i needed more upper body strength,
a little more like I had naturally had.
I'm strong. I think all women are naturally a little bit stronger below the
waist, below the thighs, nips.
That was something in my training that I worked on, and I felt like in order
to put me in the playing field with all the other jockeys, whether that's a
(10:58):
male-female thing or just a personal deficit.
So talking about strength and relaxation and how that might show up differently
in the female body and dressage, particularly with generally stronger in the core and the legs.
And my understanding is in the sport of horse racing, you actually have to be
(11:21):
quite strong in the upper body as well.
And combining that with relaxation, I'm curious about how that plays a part
in you developing your training programs for yourself.
Yeah, so one of the things that I realized early on, I started writing when
I was 21. And by the time I was six months into it, I realized that.
(11:43):
Just adding strength training was not making me as strong as I wanted to be and needed to be.
And so I had to change my diet quite a bit. I learned when I started to research
this that the body of a 22-year-old woman can figure out how to make fat out
of lettuce and chicken breast because it is biologically designed to create
(12:03):
a baby and to create a safe space for a baby.
Whereas the body of a 22-year-old male can figure out how to make muscle out
of Twinkies because that's what their bodies do.
And so I had to trick my body into building muscle instead of that.
And I did that by, I didn't ever eliminate proteins or carbohydrates,
but I didn't have them at the same meal for maybe five years.
(12:26):
Because when you combine protein and carbohydrates, it makes it really difficult
to digest because it takes acid to digest protein and alkaline to digest carbohydrates.
And when those things enter your intestinal tract, they neutralize each other.
So then it takes more acid and more alkaline, more acid, more alkaline.
And so you just have to make the digestive process more efficient so that your
(12:49):
body can immediately grab what you gave it and build some muscle with it or
use it for fiber and help clean out your system.
So I had to tweak. Not only did I have to work out a lot more,
I also had to change my diet pretty significantly.
Also, I was a natural lightweight. weight. Prior to that, my habit every day
(13:10):
was to pick up a little six pack of those little Debbie's powdered sugar donuts
and a chocolate milk on my way to the barn.
And I still weighed 98 pounds. I could get away with eating whatever and not
gaining weight, but I wasn't building muscle.
Also talking about the relaxation and just like the biologically female approach to dealing with horses.
(13:32):
If there is a lack of strength, there's more emphasis on harmonious relationship
rather than physically dominating a horse.
I was never going to not ride a horse because I wasn't strong enough to ride it.
But having said that, my mother, a jockey before me, always said that the muscle
that she used the most to ride horses was her brain.
(13:53):
And I would totally agree with that that
most of the time whenever I rode a problem horse
that was running off with other people it didn't not run off with me because
I was stronger it didn't run off with me because my relationship with that horse
was stronger if we look at the history of the rodeo in the west going back in
(14:14):
time the women who were involved in the rodeo after the death of
a cowgirl called Bonnie McCarroll.
She died in 1929 and women weren't allowed to compete for 70 years.
I didn't know that. Yeah. So barrel racing was when women came back into that sport.
(14:35):
So there has been said the brutality of the rodeo could have been more effectively
managed by increasing women's involvement rather than decreasing it at that time.
If we look at the development in horse racing and the development of so many
women in dressage and jumping, but you still got male athletes at the highest level in a.
(15:01):
Inverse proportion and there's an
inverse proportion perhaps in horse racing where
is the great equalizer here are horses
the great equalizer or is it first of all i want to make a parallel between
what you said happened in 1929 with women involved with rodeos the activist
(15:21):
approach to protect women from rodeos and at rodeos was to not let women compete in rodeos.
And I bet there were a lot of women who disagreed with that approach, right?
A lot of women who still wanted to be able to participate in rodeo.
And I would say that the extreme animal rights activist approach for us to protect
horses is the same. Okay, but don't compete with them.
(15:41):
Not for nothing, but they're very expensive lawn ornaments.
And so if we don't get to compete with them, we're not going to have horses
in our society or in our culture. And our culture was built on the backs of horses.
There's not that long ago when cars weren't a thing and horses Horses worked
every single farm, and that was the transportation.
And so it's interesting that activists now, their approach is,
(16:04):
okay, then we won't let them compete when horses actually like to compete.
We can't make horses compete.
And so I think that is an interesting parallel.
So talking about activism and looking at the bigger picture,
not just what's immediately in front of us.
Yesterday, we had horses loose in central London.
(16:25):
And clearly the result of a traumatic accident that was unforeseen,
riders got unseated and the news media was saying horses were rampaging.
Clearly they were doing what horses know how to do, which is flee from danger.
Where is the conflict between perceived welfare issues and actual welfare issues?
(16:52):
Oftentimes the conflict is from the observer. I think that there are animal
rights extremists who perceive every use of a course outside of them standing
out in a paddock or a pasture.
Or just being in the wild as a perceived danger. And I don't think that they
realize how much better cared for they are when they are closer to civilization.
(17:16):
Let's just back way up to when horses, I've often made the case for horses domesticating
themselves, not us domesticating them so much because they let us ride them. They let us race them.
There's lots of things they let us do that if they didn't want to do.
And we've all seen horses that didn't want to do these things. And guess what?
We don't compete with them because we can't make them. We haven't figured out
(17:37):
a way to make them do something that they don't want to do.
So for us, the trick is always then keeping the horse happy and making sure
that this is something that they enjoy doing by keeping them fresh.
And at the same time, certainly with horse racing, we do have the responsibility
of making sure that we are taking care of the horse and that we're expecting
certain conditions to be met before four horses are allowed to be raced.
(18:00):
And to that point, the Jockey Club in the United States created an equine injury
database starting in 2009.
And since 2009, the rate of catastrophic injuries with equines has gone down
by 33%. It was actually down by 37% last year.
And then we had a slight uptick last year that brought that back up with a rash
(18:23):
of injuries that happened at at a couple of different racetracks.
But that is trending in the right direction. And certainly in thoroughbred racing.
Every power to be has come together to figure out a way to make it as safe as
possible for the equine athletes.
Do you think that we're asking equine athletes to do more than they can do because
(18:46):
there is a training and perhaps even breeding issue in multiple disciplines going on?
In the last six months, I have read Lexington about the horse.
I've read the first Kentucky Derby. I've read a book called Kelso.
And I can assure you that the demands of racing were much harder on horses.
(19:07):
Lexington is a perfect example. example, this is a horse who raced and let's
see, the first Kentucky Derby was 1975.
That was the year that he died in 25 then. And so he started racing or he was
born in 1950 and the races that he ran in were four mile heats and you had to
win at least two of them on a card to be declared the winner of that four mile heat.
(19:31):
And so there were days that he raced 12 miles because if he won the first heat
and another horse won the second heat, then there had to be a third heat and
there was 45 minutes in between.
And so I think we've come a long way. I think we are much easier on horses.
Now the distances have gotten shorter.
We've changed racing surfaces. Back in that era, we only had dirt and it was
(19:53):
more like a plowed field than what on today's manicured racetracks.
Today we've got synthetic, we've got turf, we've got, again,
really well, highly monitored dirt dirt racetracks.
And in third red racing, would he have made the sport safer since 2009 and definitely safer since 1850?
So knowing that the statistics of catastrophic injuries percentage wise with
(20:19):
starts going down as well, my understanding is we can't completely get rid of
catastrophic injuries.
So how do we cope with that? The NTRA just released a new commercial that's
going to run Derby Week and I think on the Derby coverage and it's a safety
(20:40):
first video that goes into all the technology that horse racing is using now
to try to keep horses safe.
But I do think that we need to be more proactive in the messaging.
I don't think it's ever a good idea to say that we're going to get to zero.
We can always say that our goal is zero and it's always going to be our goal
is to get to zero catastrophic injuries. But I think it's an unrealistic...
(21:04):
Expectation, given the fact that at the end of the day, catastrophic injuries are in fact very rare.
So at this point, I think it's 1.26 per 1,000 starts, which means that more
than 99% of the time, a catastrophic injury does not occur.
Then when a catastrophic injury does occur, it has very little in common with
(21:25):
the one that happened prior to it.
So maybe one horse has a fatal injury on the dirt course, another one on the
dirt course, another one on a sloppy racetrack on the dirt course,
another one on a fast racetrack on the dirt course.
So now you've got three different surfaces that we're talking about minimum
and different places on the track.
One of them was at the half mile pole. The other one was at the quarter pole.
(21:47):
The other one was just past the wire.
Now we've got that variable and then different sites of injury on the horse.
One horse broke its shoulder.
Another horse blew its stifle out. Another horse has a broken fetlock.
And so because the injuries themselves are in fact rare and then rarely have
anything in common, it's very difficult to hone in on exactly the cause of the injury.
(22:12):
And it's probably different in every single horse.
And most of the time it's the straw that broke the camel's back and it's a cumulative
issue and not something that just suddenly happened.
And where where our technology is right now and where our best chance lies is
in trying to find predictive technology.
And that's what they're using now, stride safe technology that monitors a horse's
(22:35):
stride, gives you a green, yellow, or red light based on the horse's stride
from one day to the next. And so.
In thoroughbred racing anyway, they are starting to incorporate predictive technology
and software that can help us to see that a horse's stride or maybe even just
statistics like heart rate variability are different.
(22:56):
One thing that I wanted to point out on this, on what we just talked about,
what Donna just talked about, is that because I have a training business,
I work with show horses right now.
And I see a lot of horses where I'm working on rehabilitation.
Behavior problem, and things like that. And we see with these racing devices,
some of these devices start to trickle down into the show horses.
(23:18):
And that's something that I definitely
really appreciate in terms of cross-discipline exposure that I have.
Yuki, I'm wondering if you might want to speak about current research in racing the young horses.
So, once I transitioned out of racing and I started to get back into the show
horses and I got involved with the training aspect of it,
(23:39):
a lot of the show horse people that I worked with had the perspective that the
race horses were started just much too early.
And there's a lot of research that supports that
they actually started at exactly the
right time in that two or three year old year
we start to train them and it's in large part because the way that the bone
(24:03):
develops in that time that it's still in a growth stage the horse has different
growth plates throughout the body and as those growth plates fused they become
more of of an adult, right?
The bone starts to become more of a remodeling type function as opposed to a
gross function, whether it's laying down new bone.
(24:26):
In an adult horse, the gross remodeling is more like arthritis.
Remodeling, fractional repair. In younger horses, they're working on,
okay, what type of activity is this bone receiving and how can we change this
bone to make it stronger?
And so in these young race horses, what studies have shown is that when we start
(24:51):
to train them at that time, when we start to compete them in terms of what they
can do as an individual horse,
and it's an appropriate readactivity for them, for what that individual horse
can handle, then you have a horse that lays down a bone that is stronger and
thicker as opposed to longer and a little bit more fragile.
(25:14):
I was just going to say the reality is that the stress on the bone is what causes the remodeling.
And without the stress on the bone, you don't get that same cartilage rebuilding
and remodeling that you get.
And the stress on the bone, and it's a fine line, Trudy, between enough stress and too much stress.
And that's where horse trainers come in, in their expertise.
They have found, and it was Dr.
(25:35):
Bramlage's research, that if you are not stressing the bone,
meaning getting speed work in that horse that is causing stress to the bone
at that age of development, age two.
At that age of bone development, then you end up with a horse that is structurally
less sound than a horse that was able to do that bone remodeling because of the stress at age two.
(26:00):
And that isn't necessarily true for all breeds, right? Thoroughbreds,
they develop more quickly.
And in fact, there are countries like in Australia that are developing thoroughbreds
where they're maturing actually sooner than the ones here.
And so there's breeding manipulation, there's bloodline manipulation,
(26:20):
how soon a horse matures and at what stage is that horse ready to start training.
Sometimes that is not just a physical issue. Sometimes it's a mental issue and
that horse is just too immature to handle the basic early development of training requirements.
The warm blunts, they take longer to mature.
(26:42):
Draft horses take longer to mature. Arabian horses are slower or mentally too mature.
So it really runs the gamut. What is necessarily true for one breed or one discipline
is not necessarily going to be true for another.
I think that's a good perspective to take when you're looking cross-discipline
at what other people are doing with their horses.
(27:04):
Yeah. And I think one of the main reasons for that is because in the dressage
world where they don't really allow a horse to do the exercises for a pia or
passage until they're older,
it's because they don't really have the muscle foundation for it yet.
And so they can't do it correctly.
So they don't want to teach them to do it at a young age incorrectly.
And I could be wrong about some of that because this is definitely not my world.
(27:27):
But I do have a respect for staying horses at the highest level of dressage
when they are at the best.
And so my understanding is that they have to wait to let them develop to do
those because of the muscles, but not so much because of the bones.
And they're never going to be asked to do speed work, at least hopefully.
We're hoping not to do speed work on dressage horses. Absolutely.
(27:49):
It's also really important that they can mentally handle it as well.
And you can make argument that racing is way more straightforward than dressage
because it's who gets past the post first,
whereas in dressage, it's very subjective and we have the cultural issue now
(28:10):
of judging and how that shows up.
Going back to if we look at catastrophic breakdowns not being a result of of
inhumane treatment and that there's no particular common denominator.
How effective is the medication testing?
We know it's highly sensitive in the horse racing industry.
(28:34):
Are we missing something else? If we're missing something else,
I don't think it's related to medication.
We do have a lot of predictive models right now about what horses are more likely
to have a catastrophic injury. For instance, if a horse has ever been on a vet's list.
So if the horse has ever been on the vet's list, and it's very easy to get on
the vet's list in thoroughbred racing, all you have to do is have a bad performance.
(28:56):
Let's say a horse runs a bad race, and we call that a DNF, did not finish,
and they run behind the field, they're on the vet's list.
If they're having a morning work, and for some reason they pull up partway through
that work, they're on the vet's list.
And so it's very easy for a horse to get on the vet's list.
Not super easy to get off the vet's list, but our predictive models are indicating
that horses who've been on the vets list, which stands to reason,
(29:19):
are at higher risk for an injury.
But as far as the medications go, I can't imagine a cleaner sport than horse racing right now.
The Horse Racing Integrity and Safety Authority came on board a couple of years ago.
And in speaking with Lisa Lazarus, who's the CEO of what's called HISA,
the acronym for the authority, she said that quite frankly, some of the racing
(29:42):
jurisdictions in different states were testing for.
Maybe three, four, five drugs, maybe up to 20.
And HISA tests for up to 200 different drugs.
And so they essentially warned different racing jurisdictions in advance,
you better clean it up because we are going to be having much more rigorous
(30:03):
testing than you've ever had before.
A lot of racing jurisdictions, trainers for that matter, didn't realize that
their testing wasn't that comprehensive.
And so they weren't necessarily getting away with anything before because they
didn't know that they could have gotten away with something.
But the other thing that they're doing is that just like in the Olympic sports
or other sports, they're freezing samples.
(30:23):
And yeah, there may be things that you are using right now that we can't test for.
But when the technology gets there, we will go back and test these frozen samples
and you'll be punished as if it just happened.
I think a great example of that is the use of bisphosphonates.
They were, we didn't have testing available for that beyond 30 days.
Now just recently we kept testing about the year mark where we can detect dysphosphonates
(30:48):
and within the system of the horse and that was one that a few years ago was
being attributed to a few of the catastrophic breakdowns that were happening.
Yeah so this is a drug that was used specifically for older horses to treat
a disorder called nyspnebicular which anybody who's ever had horses knows what
that is but people were using it off label to treat other soundness issues and
(31:11):
And what they learned is especially in using it in young horses,
for any reason whatsoever,
it causes that bone remodeling that we were talking about earlier to not happen
properly and leads to eventual more unsoundness than they would otherwise have.
We all have the privilege and pleasure of having horses in our lives on a daily basis.
(31:33):
And so I just want to acknowledge that we can't tell spectators of horse racing
or any horse sports to ignore their distress when they see an animal suffering.
So normalizing the response to the distress that we might see on the news.
(31:55):
How could we in the horse industry and horse lovers educate and both support
the general public about equine welfare and how to understand coping with anger or grief?
I would hope that we never normalize it. But one of the examples that I've used
is that thousands of people die in automobile accidents every single day.
(32:16):
And if we We had to watch on the news every single day a child laying dead on the side of the road.
I don't think we'd ever be able to strap our children into cars and take them
to hockey practice or to school every day.
So we realize that driving cars is not 100% safe and that there are inherent
risks involved with that, but we don't let it stop us from doing something that
(32:38):
we feel is necessary, which is driving our kids to school or to practices.
And where horses are concerned, the thing is that people, I think,
have a tendency to think, with horse racing especially,
it's low-hanging fruit because the majority of our catastrophic injuries are
recorded incidents in a race where there's video footage of it.
(33:00):
And so it's very easy for animal rights extremists to run those videos back
and say, this is what horse racing is doing, while not pointing out the fact
that it is still exceedingly rare for that to happen. and.
I was at Saratoga this past summer. One of my best friends was in town and she
does not have a horse racing background.
She likes horse racing, but she's never ridden a horse and she likes to come
(33:22):
back on the horses. And there was a catastrophic injury that day and it upset her.
And I understood that it upset her. We were going to dinner with some people
after the races and on our way to dinner, she said, look, I just need you to
know that I'm not okay yet. And I do need to talk about this later.
And I said, I am here for you. We'll talk about it later. And so after dinner,
she said, I need to know about that happening.
(33:45):
Is that a frequent occurrence in horse racing? And I said, no.
And I gave her the statistics that I've already talked about.
More than 99% of the time, it doesn't happen.
But the reality is that it does happen in the wild.
It happens in the wild more often than it happens on racetracks.
And in the wild, when a horse has a catastrophic injury, the ending is far more
(34:08):
cruel than what we see on the racetrack.
So on the racetrack, we have immediate humane euthanasia.
If a horse has a compound fracture, meaning the skin is broke,
we know that the infection and the chance of infection is far too great to try
to heal the, even if you could put a cast on it, the horse has to be able to
bear weight on that leg, at least some amount of weight or else it's going to founder.
(34:32):
It's going to die of laminitis, I'm going to call it.
It's going to have just a longer time of suffering.
So we know that in some of these injuries, humane euthanasia is the very first and only approach.
But there are many injuries that happen to horses that they do recover from
and that we do splint or we do find a way to bring them back or they have surgery.
(34:54):
I do think that the focus tends to be on the catastrophic injuries and how tragic
that That is, and people don't realize that these catastrophic injuries happen in fields,
happen with brood mares, happen with foals, and also happen with horses out in the wild.
I also think it'd be helpful to find ways of supporting people watching this
(35:18):
or looking at news articles and maybe teaching them coping strategies,
understanding the process of what goes on and why this is happening. Also.
The news media is very focused on negative news stories in general.
And we know the world is in crisis. There is war and natural disasters and kids
(35:42):
dying of fentanyl overdoses, including what are we doing for horses that's good?
Why are we all invested in the horse-human bond? What's so amazing about them?
I know when I come back, I want to be Yuki's horse because I'm sure you're good.
(36:02):
Yours is too. I've never worked for a horse trainer on the racetrack who isn't
good to their horses, but the thoroughbred horses have a good life.
And I know the same is true in the show world. There's going to be a bad apple
in every sport, every organization, and you're always going to be able to point
to somebody who is not good to their horses.
But at least on the racetrack, I can tell you a few examples where,
(36:25):
in fact, one was a woman horse trainer who was beating her of horses.
It was tied to the back of a stall with a rake and the horse reared up and flipped. It was horrible.
I watched the video one time and I could never watch it again.
She was initially, one of her employees recorded the video to turn her in because it's rare.
(36:46):
It's just not something that you get desensitized to see that sort of mistreatment of an animal.
So one of her employees turned her in and the stewards originally banned her
for 30 days, but the public outcry from within in the industry was that this
woman needed to be banned for life, never touch a thoroughbred in our industry again.
And she subsequently was banned for life because it's just not something that
(37:10):
99% of the people in the industry can tolerate.
I know there's an encouraging whistleblowers. There is a hotline with the horse
integrity welfare unit that people can call in anonymous tips.
And I know that's not necessarily the case in other horse sports.
Hopefully that can be a model for others. And Trudy, you're referring to HIWU,
(37:35):
the Horse Racing Integrity and Welfare Unit, which is a branch of HISA.
So HIWU is the organization that HISA employed to do the testing procedures
and to do boots on the ground investigation. Thanks.
I'll add a link to them in our show notes as well.
Yuki, you named in the very beginning of our conversation about your grandfather
(37:57):
was interested in economic growth and the horse sports, it's an industry, right?
There is a huge economic impact with jobs.
I do know that there is this elitist look at some horse sports because it's
very expensive and there are some great organizations out there that are promoting
(38:18):
horse sports for underserved populations in particular.
Like the Ed Brown Society has scholarships for including African-Americans in
the horse racing industry.
I'm wondering, how can we include more of the general public having access to horse sports?
(38:40):
I think there's more and more studies coming out these days that show just how
symbiotic our Our relationship and the benefit is between horses and humans, much they can improve.
The environment for disadvantaged children and how can we make this more available to.
(39:01):
To to kids but also to what
what is their effect on ptsd rates i
remember a study the other day where the improvement to
ptsd in the vietnam war vets when
they started working with horses and these are veterans that have had
teach severe ptsd for 40 some
years is is something in
(39:23):
the range of like 70 to 80 percent within a
couple of months time just for working with
horses so there's a huge benefit not just the
economic impact of the the racing industry it's a big driver of the economy
and in a lot of places not just here in the states but all over the world yeah
i don't have the statistics in front of me but the united states horse council
(39:47):
has these statistics and not
just the economy driver that it is, but also the green space driver.
Think about all the green space that horses use, whether it's breeding horses
or just young horses or just horses that are retired.
All the green space that they require that if that green space goes away,
could turn into land development.
(40:08):
And quite frankly, I like the green space.
That's right. And it seems unrealistic when people say, let the horses be free,
send them to a sanctuary.
That is not possible. We can look at the plight of wild horses as a disaster
because they're in concrete pens.
There's so many of them and they're contained together.
(40:31):
So keeping horses as part of our culture, we have a long co-evolution with them.
And that seems to be key in...
Maintaining our sports in all the different equestrian disciplines.
I think without that relationship, it's in our DNA, Trudy. At the end of the day, it's in our DNA.
(40:53):
There's so many things that people talk about. I'll give you a for example.
Here in Kentucky, I had the opportunity to ride some of the Icelandic courses,
which I don't know if you all have ridden them, but they are about Welsh pony
size, maybe around 14 hands.
And they are a very docile breed
very friendly and they have
(41:13):
these unique strides where they can do a pacing stride and
a trotting stride they can also just do a regular gallop but they're really
quite unique horses and the woman who breeds this Icelandic breed here in the
United or here in Kentucky the horses that the horse that I rode that day and
the horses that she has with the exception of just maybe one or two breeding
(41:34):
stock that she got from Iceland were
all born and raised in the United States.
And she said that the only thing that spooks the horses from Iceland are trees
because it's the one thing they don't have in Iceland.
And so they're not used to seeing trees. But even these Icelandic breeds who
were born in the United States and have seen trees their whole life,
if they come out of a, they're in a field and all of a sudden they approach trees,
(41:57):
they immediately spook at the trees because it's in their DNA.
Just like it's in our DNA to have a symbiotic relationship with horses where
we take care of the horses and the horses take care of us.
And I don't think that's going to go away anytime soon.
I think speaking from a purely sport perspective as well, this is really a team sport.
(42:18):
I think a lot of people look at this like it's an individual sport and it's just you on your horse.
We talk about the jockey that won, but really it's about the horse that won.
And that partnership, not just between the rider and the horse,
but there's always a team of people that help to make that happen.
It's the same with corsage, with jumping. It's a partnership.
(42:41):
It's no matter the discipline, we're dancing with another individual.
And in order to make it beautiful, visually from the ground,
in order to make that it's not just about the movement, there is some gaiety,
some joie de vivre in dancing with your horse, right?
And this is part of what brings joy and has brought joy to mankind,
(43:02):
why horses have made people so happy for thousands of years,
why we're able to take them at one point into war, now competing.
And even in what Trudy had mentioned earlier, in this therapeutic setting,
we have now horses that are shielding humans and doing just unbelievable things in a therapy setting.
(43:24):
They're tremendous. We can't do anything but put them first.
And I think if you're a horseman, you're putting your horses first.
This connection with the natural world through horses is so powerful.
Donna, you were talking about green space and Yuki, you're mentioning the therapeutic aspect.
And this morning while I was drinking my tea, I was scrolling through Instagram
(43:47):
and I follow this account called Inside the Backstretch.
People were commenting who work
in the backside of the industry about what they enjoy about their work.
And so much of it was the sensory experience, like the embodied experience of
the smells of the barn and just being with the horses and how it makes people
(44:11):
feel relaxed and comfortable and connected and grounded.
That cannot be underestimated. well the thing about the horse is that you just
show up as you are right like i think with so many people and jobs and workplaces
people are expected to show up in a way that doesn't feel.
True to them and with a horse if you don't show up in a way that feels true
(44:34):
to the horse and to you you're immediately exposed and so you you immediately
have to just drop whatever emotion that you brought that isn't just an interaction
between you and the horse so if you show up
angry or you show up frustrated, that horse knows that you're angry and it doesn't
know that you're not angry at it.
(44:55):
And so it automatically is standoffish from you and it makes you dispel that
anger and go, okay, that's right. I'm here. I'm with you.
That thing that made me angry isn't here anymore.
And so it just helps you to start to unload that baggage that isn't helpful
in the interaction that you have with the horse.
I find it very grounding just to be outside and with the horses at the end of the day.
(45:19):
Yuki, I know that your horse also has a special gift as a therapeutic horse.
Yes, he does. Thanks to you. I'm so glad that he gets to work with you. He genuinely loves it.
There's always that aspect of it. When Donna had mentioned earlier that we can't
make these horses do, we can't force them to compete.
(45:40):
It really does take a partnership. They really enjoy the horses that I've been
fortunate enough to get on the racetrack and all through my riding career,
whether it's show horses or in racing.
The ones that do well are the ones that have been taught. They know the game.
They become very proficient with it. They've had the good support and they look
(46:00):
forward to it. Everyone loves that.
And probably who shows has had that experience where they've had a show horse
that can't wait to get into the ring.
They're maybe even two different personalities outside
of the ring and training and then they get into the show ring and they're
on point they're perfect you've never seen
this horse before right and it becomes one of your favorite show horses because
(46:22):
of that and same with the racing i'm wondering if both of you might share some
of your experiences of actually riding in races and anything that is standing
out for you as an amazing visceral experience of being
connected with a horse in a harmonious way.
Oh, God, there's so many stories, Trudy. Like when you, I won over a thousand
(46:45):
races, which means I rode over 10,000 races.
I can tell you one story that's funny is that there was this horse named David's
Diamond that I was up at Rockingham Park and I had the bug, meaning I was an apprentice rider.
And the trainer asked me if I'd gallop the horse one morning.
And I really didn't want that to go well because I didn't want the trainer to
(47:06):
ask me to gallop the horse every day. it.
And I knew the horse was a little bit of a runoff, meaning he would just take
off. And I thought, I'm just going to let him go.
Like he'll just run off with me. And then the trainer won't ever ask me to come
galloping again and it'll be perfect.
So I jogged him off for a little bit and like I jogged him off for a good quarter of a mile.
So he would be warmed up before he just took off. And then I just throw him
(47:29):
his head and he took off for a 16th of a mile.
And then he came back to me and then just galloped a pony horse around there.
When I came back to train, it was like, oh my God, he's never gone that well
for anybody. Can you come get him tomorrow?
So sometimes you're like, that's it. I'm just going to let the horse do whatever
it wants. And you let the horse do whatever it wants. And turns out you guys
(47:50):
actually both want the same thing.
That's right. I think in terms of my own experiences,
whether it's racing or the show horses, the highest high that I always get is
when I really am connected to that horse that I'm on. We're really moving as one.
The aids become very light, very subtle, and the joy, right?
(48:14):
There's a great joy in that community between rider and animal.
There's nothing like it. And
I know that I speak for every horseman out there. That's where it's at.
When people ask who your favorite horse is, I always tell people that what we
love about horses is the communication.
So our favorite horses are always going to be the horses who are most willing to communicate with us.
(48:38):
And sometimes you have to work for their trust in order to get that.
It's not an automatic, but when you get that level of communication to another
level, that's when it becomes really a gratifying relationship.
That's right. And that actually was one of the big drivers of transitioning
into training being a very easy thing for me is when there is a problem,
(48:59):
trying to figure out what that is. Because sometimes it is behavior.
Sometimes it's a physical problem. Sometimes it's an equipment problem.
Being able to figure those things out and then develop that horse in a way that
really brings out its personality and makes it communicate more is a huge victory.
And Yuki talked about transitioning to training.
(49:22):
And I'd love to hear from both of you about your transitioning from both being
jockeys and then because Yuki, you're still working more on the backside and
Donna, you're very much in the forefront of the industry.
So how was that transition for both of you?
For me, it was road horses professionally for 26 years.
(49:44):
I galloped horses in the morning for four and a half years before I became a
jockey. I was a jockey for 12 years and then galloped horses for my husband
after I retired from being a jockey until 2009.
And during that time, in 2000, I went to work for NBC Sports and also started
doing some of the interviews from horseback.
(50:04):
And so for me, it never felt like a transition because I had both of those things
in my life simultaneously.
I thought when my husband retired in 2009 and I wasn't going to gallop horses
anymore, more, I thought I would really miss it.
And I thought if I miss it, I can always go back to work. And so luckily a year
before that, I got a dog and we would go trail running all the time.
(50:27):
And a month or two went by and I really didn't miss riding horses day in and day out.
And I realized that it was because I still had that interaction with animals
and I still was outside on a daily basis. And that was important too.
And at the end of the day, the horses that I rode are thoroughbreds and thoroughbreds
are fun and they're explosive and they're fast and they're all of those things,
(50:49):
but they can be more dangerous than other horses. And,
I rode those horses for 26 years and no, I don't want to go trail riding.
No, I don't want to take somebody's little quarter horse and go ride around in a pen.
I'm used to riding a Ferrari, but I don't feel like I want to ride Ferraris anymore.
It doesn't feel that safe. And so I love that I get to go play around on a nice,
(51:11):
it's always usually a quarter horse or a horse that is a lead pony when I'm
covering the races on NBC and I'm on horseback.
I'm on what we call pretty bomb-proof horses. and those are horses that it's
nice to just be out there on the track and enjoy that interaction with the horse
but at the end of the day I give that horse back to its owner and they have
a groom that takes care of it and I don't have to take care of all that.
(51:34):
You certainly paid your dues there and so Yuki what was the transition like for you?
I'll be honest the transition for me was I wanted to go back to college because
I had spent riding years listening to girlfriends that were in college to see how fun it was.
(51:56):
So I had a little incentive there, but on top of that, I also was having some
problems with keeping my weight. I had a lot of muscle.
I'm like, Donna, I build it really quickly and very easily.
And so I got heavy. And the stronger I got, the more races I rode,
the bigger I got. It was tough to make weight.
And then I also had just general wear and tear and some injuries that I was
(52:20):
having some trouble with.
So I went back to school.
I thought at the time I had, just like Donna said, I've been getting on these
Ferraris. I'll never want to, if I'm out, I'm out.
And then I think it was a few years later where I obviously couldn't stay out
because the horses are an addiction.
(52:40):
That they get in your blood and then you can't get them out.
So I think within a couple of years, I had adopted a horse of my own off of
the racetrack that I had ridden when I was still involved in racing.
And I think I've been fortunate that I've always been able to have really great
mentorship surrounded by people that are very knowledgeable,
(53:04):
very experienced, very passionate about what they do.
It's heavily influenced me. And it's not something that ever goes away.
And so that's something that I still am able to bring forward to my training environment.
And hopefully that is something that I still need to spread and pass forward.
And Yuki, naming the addiction that we all seem to have for horses in some way, shape or form.
(53:30):
And Donna, you'd mentioned about riding dangerous, explosive horses.
The reality is...
No matter how wonderful our connection is with these horses,
that sometimes because of their very nature of being prey animals,
that they can be dangerous.
Even the most docile horse can be dangerous.
(53:54):
How can people also understand that sometimes we also have to reprimand or get
a dangerous horse under control to keep themselves safe as well as us safe?
And this isn't necessarily animal cruelty. cruelty
the analogy that i use and i think is 100 true is
that they are very much like dogs and they
(54:15):
are herd animals and dogs are pack animals and there's an alpha in every herd
and in every pack and if you are not going to be the alpha then they will because
they need for a leader to step up and be present and if you don't show yourself
as a good strong leader then they will try to be a good, strong leader,
but they don't know all the dangers that lie around them.
(54:36):
And so it's very important that you step into that leadership role.
You do not step into the leadership role through cruelty. It's not even possible.
A horse will fight you at every turn. If your answer to, I'm going to be a strong
leader, is that you're going to be a dominant person with this pack,
because the pack's not going to like you. The herd's not going to like you.
(54:57):
And so you become a strong leader by, first of all, you do control their food source.
So that certainly helps, but also you reward them when they do things really
well and you reprimand behavior that they know.
First of all, you teach them expected behavior and then you reprimand lightly
and you praise effusively.
(55:18):
And so when I was taught to train my dog, I was taught in that way that anytime
a dog does something really well to praise them effusively and to reprimand without emotion.
And it's the same way with horses. You reprimand without emotion.
Just take a step back, take a step back, right? Just reprimand without emotion, but praise effusively.
(55:38):
Now, sometimes fillies can be a little bit more difficult because their idea
of a reward is don't touch me, right?
So sometimes a filly's reward is great. You did that.
We're done for the day. So you have to learn like what is a reward to one horse
versus another horse, because they're not all treats driven or however it is
that some horses don't like to be pet.
(56:00):
But at the end of the day, horses as herd animals are very much like dogs as
pack animals and they need a good leader.
And if you want to be around horses and you want them to be trusting of you
and you want them to want to follow you, you have to be that leader. Okay.
That's a great point. I think if you imagine yourself and if you've ever had
(56:25):
a personal trainer, and there's days when you don't feel like going into training,
and you're maybe a little sullen, and it's the responsibility of your personal
trainer to help get you motivated.
And that personal trainer, the personal trainers are not all created equal.
Some are going to really drive you. Some may even drive you to the point where you're injured,
(56:47):
and then maybe another Another one is going to be that perfect one for you that
even when you show up and you're cranky and you're hurting, they have the right warmup for you.
They have the right words of encouragement for you. And then you leave that workout session.
And not only are you stronger and shitter, but mentally you feel good about it.
(57:09):
You're so glad that you went, you did the training that day.
You're so glad that you have that trainer to work with. But it's very similar,
the training scenario, the training relationship that we have with our horses.
Thanks, Yuki. I was struck by a comment that Gloria Steinem had said recently
(57:29):
about the internet is not a complete picture.
Future as we commit to change in
the equine industry also hopefully educating
others about the bigger picture what
is your hope for the future obviously I think
(57:49):
one of the great barriers that we have right now is that
we don't have an agrarian society anymore so when I was
growing up not only did we have horses but all my friends had horses not all
of them but a lot of them the girls who lived in town didn't have horses but
the ones who lived out by me all had horses and so you have so few people who
grow up in an agrarian society anymore and i'm not sure that they ever will
(58:10):
understand it to be honest but i do think that we have.
10% of people who are never going to love anything about horse sports and 10%
of people who are always going to love horse sports no matter what.
And in the middle there, you've got 80%, right?
And so it's that 80% that you're trying to help them to understand that this
is a symbiotic relationship.
(58:30):
This isn't something where we are imprisoning horses and getting them to bend to our will.
And so all we can do is just keep being proactive with the message,
like keep putting videos out there of horses and people interactions that are great.
And stop putting videos out there of people putting horses in houses.
I hate these videos. People send me these videos all the time where there's
(58:52):
a horse in a house. They're not pets that belong in your home.
They are still animals that belong outside.
And I think that the more we can share that relationship, the better off we'll be.
It's going to take 10 really good interaction videos
to counteract the one negative one that they saw and it's the same way with
horses as we know you can have 10 great days in a row with a horse and that
(59:16):
one bad day is the one they're going to remember for the next three months and
so we have to keep showing up and being the best kind of person for them and
we have to keep presenting that to the public.
Donna's talking about the agrarian lifestyle and you and I we get to see each
other fairly often we're outside
in this beautiful environment and And I also think being in nature,
(59:38):
you're more connected with life and death and grief,
whereas there's a more sanitized approach to that in the cities as well.
We are disconnected from the life cycle in many ways.
So I'm curious, with your long history of horses in your blood,
how do you see hope for the future evolving?
(01:00:00):
Social media definitely has made the environment very tense.
Not just for racing, the dressage community has recently experienced this.
It would get across the board and not just really equestrian sports, right?
And I think the big thing there is that when we see something that's negative
(01:00:21):
on the news, something that really upsets us is to look for who are the people
that are helping in this situation, right?
Who are the people that know what they're doing, that are providing guidance
and see what they're saying?
It will give you a holistic feeling.
It will give you a place to say, this is what I want to see.
This is what I want to hear. and the missions who I stand behind.
(01:00:44):
Because if you just see something that's very inflammatory and you just get
very upset about it, and it's on a subject that you maybe don't know very much
about, that can give you a lot of distress.
I know it definitely does for me. And so my first action when I see something
that's very distressing to me is to start to research it.
Yeah, I think you bring up a really good point. This was Mr.
(01:01:06):
Rogers' advice, what, all through our childhood, right?
When he said, whenever you see a distressing situation, look for the helpers
because there are always helpers.
And so we saw this recently in the horses getting loose in London,
running through the streets.
One of them had fallen and had blood on it. It was a white horse that showed up very well.
But when you watch those videos that at every turn, there were people who were
(01:01:28):
jumping out there trying to slow down the horses, trying to help catch the horses.
Once the one horse ran into a bus, there were people there who were trying to help.
And so there were helpers everywhere and those same helpers aren't there out in the wild.
Horsons also do these things that aren't good for them out in the wild and there's
not always helpers there to help them through it.
(01:01:50):
Yes, I know that was a terrible freak accident as well.
I also appreciate you both showing up today and having this conversation because
clearly we've touched on some difficult issues,
as well as understanding about the passions that you both have for horses.
And so I want to express my gratitude for both of you for engaging in this conversation today.
(01:02:17):
Thanks, Trudy. It's been a pleasure to be here. Yeah, Trudy, thanks for what you do.
It's been a pleasure to talk with both of you. And thank you for your passion
for horses and horse sports.
Thanks for joining us for this episode of the InScape Quest podcast.
Podcast please don't forget to share this episode with a friend and hit that
follow button we're excited to reconnect with you on our next adventure be sure
(01:02:41):
to find us on instagram at inscape quest for more content until next time keep
exploring the inner realms.
Welcome to InScape Quests, where insightful conversations redefine perspectives.
I'm your host, Trudy Howley.
Join me as together we delve into discussions about relationships,
work, and passions, unlocking profound insights that may shape our lives.
This is InScape Quests, where the journey within meets the quest for understanding.
(00:30):
Welcome to this next episode of the Horsepower with Heart series.
Today we delve deep into the world of horse racing with two remarkable women
who were born into the sport.
I'm delighted to introduce Donna Barton Brothers and Yuki Binns,
both with illustrious backgrounds intertwined with the hoofbeats of champions.
(00:51):
Donna Barton Brothers retired as the second leading female jockey in the United
States and now lends her expertise as a sports analyst and commentator for NBC Sports.
Not only is she a certified Bikram yoga teacher, she also dedicates her time
to serving the community, sitting on the boards of the Brain Injury Alliance
(01:13):
of Kentucky, the Thoroughbred Aftercare and Backside Learning Center.
Joining Donna is Yuki Binns, a third-generation horseman whose journey into
racing spans across various roles,
from former jockey to assistant trainer and racing manager for high-profile
owners and trainers in the U.S.
(01:34):
Beyond the racetrack, Yuki works behind the scenes while running her own training
and consulting business, Adaptive Development EQ.
Her passion lies in equine nutrition, injury rehabilitation,
rehabilitation and training development.
Together, Donna and Yuki take us on a fascinating exploration of topics surrounding
(01:56):
horse racing and horses in general.
Get ready to gallop through an engaging conversation filled with insights,
expertise and a shared love for these majestic creatures.
Welcome Donna and Yuki. I'm really delighted to be having this conversation with the two of you.
Thanks, Trudy. It's good to be here. Yeah, it's good to be with you, Trudy. Thank you.
(02:19):
We have so many different things we can talk about today.
I would really love to start.
The beginning because both of you have this amazing history as being female jockeys.
And before that, both of you had mothers that were jockeys as well.
And I'm so intrigued to hear about how you got started in the sport of horse racing.
(02:47):
I'm going to let Yuki start because her story of her mother being a jockey in
Japan is fascinating to me every time I hear it.
So my My grandfather, he owned racehorses. He was very passionate about the
sport to the point where he tried to build racetracks in other countries to
stimulate economic growth and modernization.
And so for my mother, it was very natural for her to start getting on horses,
(03:12):
which eventually led to her riding his racehorses and racing as well. And she was successful.
She rode a Chukyo racecourse in Nagoya. And I think that was definitely a big
influence for me, for my own riding career, my own sports career,
hearing her stories growing up with that she rode in the late 50s, early 60s.
(03:33):
And I think at that time, it was an anomaly. There were no women in racing in Japan at that time.
And I think even in the U.S., it was not until maybe the late 60s,
like Diane Krall, your mother, that were the barrier breakers here in the States.
And then in Japan, maybe 1996 or thereabouts, was the first female jockey that
(03:55):
was licensed under the JRA. Okay.
So I grew up in thoroughbred horse racing. My mother was one of the first half-dozen
women to be licensed as a jockey in the United States. That was in 1969.
The first license went to Kathy Kustner, who rode for the U.S.
Olympics show jumping team.
And she just happened to be the first female who challenged the rule,
(04:17):
which really was essentially a rule that was no longer valid after the Civil
Rights Act, but nobody had really challenged it in a court system yet. she challenged it.
32nd decision by the judge. Women could be licensed as a jockey.
Before Kathy could be the first female rider to ride a race,
she broke her leg in a show jumping incident.
(04:39):
And so she did end up riding races, but she wasn't the first to do it.
She's the first to get licensed. But my mother started riding in 1969.
I was born in 66. So this was always a part of my life.
And then she, by 1970, was the leading female jockey in the United States and
held that distinction for all the years that she rode.
And in fact, until four years after she retired, it wasn't until 1988 that Patty
(05:03):
Cooksey and Julie Crone went past her record.
But my point to all of that is that we had horses growing up,
but we didn't do specifically show jumping or dressage or anything like that.
We just always had horses and we had land and we would go out and ride.
And then when I started riding professionally, I'm going to say,
was galloping horses when I was 17 years old, thoroughbreds.
(05:25):
And it's so much different than just regular riding that you have to learn how to do it.
So I went to a farm in Louisville, Kentucky, Jack Van Virg's farm.
I learned how to gallop thoroughbreds. It requires an awful lot of strength
and also just a much deeper understanding of.
Trying to keep horses relaxed because the horses that we grew up riding,
(05:46):
we were trying to keep them energized, not so much relaxed.
We had old, just old horses, mostly retired from the racetrack,
some of the pony horses, companion horses.
But in any event, a lot of people in other disciplines, I think frown on thoroughbred
riding dynamics because we don't use a lot of leg and we don't use the same
(06:07):
sort of training tools that they use in other disciplines,
but that's because because jockeys ride with their irons very short.
And if we teach thoroughbreds to respond to leg cues and then you throw a jockey
on them and what they know is leg cues, that is just wasted information.
And so they're just trained a little bit differently than average riding horses.
(06:28):
But the thing that I've always appreciated about Yuki is that she has a really
good understanding of all of it.
I think it's interesting that Donna, you said your mother was the leading female
jockey and Yuki, your mother was the, only jockey, only female jockey in Japan.
And I think the only female on the racetrack as well.
(06:49):
How has that piece influenced you?
She was obviously some kind of role model. And also, I know that she quit the industry as well.
That's right. I think one big thing was the strength that shows through in the
way that she talks to me about that time.
She was eventually forced out the other jockeys didn't want to ride against
(07:13):
a woman and it was an unhappiness for her but she also was in school at the
time she was studying for the bar exam.
So I guess you could say there's some ladies here in contrast that continue
to push the women here in the U.S.
Then that's where the barrier breaking really actually happens.
(07:36):
So for me, I think it helped give me confidence at the time that I was riding.
I think it was tough for women.
I know in the time that Donna was riding is even tougher. In the time of her
mother, it was even tougher than that.
So I had that as a preface of, yeah, I know it's going to be tough.
But it's not going to be as tough as the women that came before me, for sure.
(07:57):
So that helps in terms of confidence. And at the time, I had people like Donna
and Julie Crone and these other
just amazing riders, amazing female riders that I really looked up to.
They definitely helped guide and influence my choices, how I trained.
Does that training is that training different from
(08:20):
how a man would train or how about my diet do I need to be a little cleaner
or things like that I think really had a positive impact on me that the mentorship
any time you're in any athletic endeavor I think it was a huge thing and I was
definitely fortunate to have that.
Trudy the only thing I'm going to say about that by the way is that while it
(08:41):
is a tough sport it's tough for everybody it's not just tough for the females
it's It's a tough sport to get a foothold in.
As an apprentice jockey, you don't have the experience. So what you have is
the weight advantage, which is different than most disciplines, right?
If you are new to dressage or new to eventing, they're not going to give you
a five-pound weight advantage over the experienced riders.
(09:03):
So at least in thoroughbred racing, all the apprentices do get a weight advantage.
And that's how you start to work your way into the doors of different barns.
But my mother, I've always said that if she ever experienced anything like discrimination,
she never gave it a voice.
And so when I started riding in 1987, professionally.
It just really never crossed my mind that there would be any sort of discrimination based on gender.
(09:27):
And so I never focused on it. But I remember, in fact, once meeting a trainer
named Wilson Brown in Minnesota, my agent and I went by his barn and he said,
nice of you to stop by young lady, but I don't ride women or actually said girls.
And I said, sir, it's a pleasure to meet you too.
And I don't ride like a girl. Why don't you just watch me?
And the next Next day, I beat one of his horses by a nose on the wire and I
(09:52):
stopped by his barn and he said, you're right.
So whatever that means, it typically means a rider who's not a strong finisher.
And I knew plenty of guys who were not strong finishers.
And so it just took a matter of showing people that you could compete at that level.
I also worked out in the gym with a lot of the jockeys that I rode with.
So they knew I could lift what they could lift, if not more. so they
(10:14):
couldn't say that i wasn't as strong as they were which is
the other advantage of this sport for from
a equestrian standpoint is that we all weigh the same i'm pretty close to the
same right so as opposed to other sports like baseball or football or basketball
where the men clearly have a size advantage i think that they're for my personal
(10:37):
experience i felt like i needed more upper body strength,
a little more like I had naturally had.
I'm strong. I think all women are naturally a little bit stronger below the
waist, below the thighs, nips.
That was something in my training that I worked on, and I felt like in order
to put me in the playing field with all the other jockeys, whether that's a
(10:58):
male-female thing or just a personal deficit.
So talking about strength and relaxation and how that might show up differently
in the female body and dressage, particularly with generally stronger in the core and the legs.
And my understanding is in the sport of horse racing, you actually have to be
(11:21):
quite strong in the upper body as well.
And combining that with relaxation, I'm curious about how that plays a part
in you developing your training programs for yourself.
Yeah, so one of the things that I realized early on, I started writing when
I was 21. And by the time I was six months into it, I realized that.
(11:43):
Just adding strength training was not making me as strong as I wanted to be and needed to be.
And so I had to change my diet quite a bit. I learned when I started to research
this that the body of a 22-year-old woman can figure out how to make fat out
of lettuce and chicken breast because it is biologically designed to create
(12:03):
a baby and to create a safe space for a baby.
Whereas the body of a 22-year-old male can figure out how to make muscle out
of Twinkies because that's what their bodies do.
And so I had to trick my body into building muscle instead of that.
And I did that by, I didn't ever eliminate proteins or carbohydrates,
but I didn't have them at the same meal for maybe five years.
(12:26):
Because when you combine protein and carbohydrates, it makes it really difficult
to digest because it takes acid to digest protein and alkaline to digest carbohydrates.
And when those things enter your intestinal tract, they neutralize each other.
So then it takes more acid and more alkaline, more acid, more alkaline.
And so you just have to make the digestive process more efficient so that your
(12:49):
body can immediately grab what you gave it and build some muscle with it or
use it for fiber and help clean out your system.
So I had to tweak. Not only did I have to work out a lot more,
I also had to change my diet pretty significantly.
Also, I was a natural lightweight. weight. Prior to that, my habit every day
(13:10):
was to pick up a little six pack of those little Debbie's powdered sugar donuts
and a chocolate milk on my way to the barn.
And I still weighed 98 pounds. I could get away with eating whatever and not
gaining weight, but I wasn't building muscle.
Also talking about the relaxation and just like the biologically female approach to dealing with horses.
(13:32):
If there is a lack of strength, there's more emphasis on harmonious relationship
rather than physically dominating a horse.
I was never going to not ride a horse because I wasn't strong enough to ride it.
But having said that, my mother, a jockey before me, always said that the muscle
that she used the most to ride horses was her brain.
(13:53):
And I would totally agree with that that
most of the time whenever I rode a problem horse
that was running off with other people it didn't not run off with me because
I was stronger it didn't run off with me because my relationship with that horse
was stronger if we look at the history of the rodeo in the west going back in
(14:14):
time the women who were involved in the rodeo after the death of
a cowgirl called Bonnie McCarroll.
She died in 1929 and women weren't allowed to compete for 70 years.
I didn't know that. Yeah. So barrel racing was when women came back into that sport.
(14:35):
So there has been said the brutality of the rodeo could have been more effectively
managed by increasing women's involvement rather than decreasing it at that time.
If we look at the development in horse racing and the development of so many
women in dressage and jumping, but you still got male athletes at the highest level in a.
(15:01):
Inverse proportion and there's an
inverse proportion perhaps in horse racing where
is the great equalizer here are horses
the great equalizer or is it first of all i want to make a parallel between
what you said happened in 1929 with women involved with rodeos the activist
(15:21):
approach to protect women from rodeos and at rodeos was to not let women compete in rodeos.
And I bet there were a lot of women who disagreed with that approach, right?
A lot of women who still wanted to be able to participate in rodeo.
And I would say that the extreme animal rights activist approach for us to protect
horses is the same. Okay, but don't compete with them.
(15:41):
Not for nothing, but they're very expensive lawn ornaments.
And so if we don't get to compete with them, we're not going to have horses
in our society or in our culture. And our culture was built on the backs of horses.
There's not that long ago when cars weren't a thing and horses Horses worked
every single farm, and that was the transportation.
And so it's interesting that activists now, their approach is,
(16:04):
okay, then we won't let them compete when horses actually like to compete.
We can't make horses compete.
And so I think that is an interesting parallel.
So talking about activism and looking at the bigger picture,
not just what's immediately in front of us.
Yesterday, we had horses loose in central London.
(16:25):
And clearly the result of a traumatic accident that was unforeseen,
riders got unseated and the news media was saying horses were rampaging.
Clearly they were doing what horses know how to do, which is flee from danger.
Where is the conflict between perceived welfare issues and actual welfare issues?
(16:52):
Oftentimes the conflict is from the observer. I think that there are animal
rights extremists who perceive every use of a course outside of them standing
out in a paddock or a pasture.
Or just being in the wild as a perceived danger. And I don't think that they
realize how much better cared for they are when they are closer to civilization.
(17:16):
Let's just back way up to when horses, I've often made the case for horses domesticating
themselves, not us domesticating them so much because they let us ride them. They let us race them.
There's lots of things they let us do that if they didn't want to do.
And we've all seen horses that didn't want to do these things. And guess what?
We don't compete with them because we can't make them. We haven't figured out
(17:37):
a way to make them do something that they don't want to do.
So for us, the trick is always then keeping the horse happy and making sure
that this is something that they enjoy doing by keeping them fresh.
And at the same time, certainly with horse racing, we do have the responsibility
of making sure that we are taking care of the horse and that we're expecting
certain conditions to be met before four horses are allowed to be raced.
(18:00):
And to that point, the Jockey Club in the United States created an equine injury
database starting in 2009.
And since 2009, the rate of catastrophic injuries with equines has gone down
by 33%. It was actually down by 37% last year.
And then we had a slight uptick last year that brought that back up with a rash
(18:23):
of injuries that happened at at a couple of different racetracks.
But that is trending in the right direction. And certainly in thoroughbred racing.
Every power to be has come together to figure out a way to make it as safe as
possible for the equine athletes.
Do you think that we're asking equine athletes to do more than they can do because
(18:46):
there is a training and perhaps even breeding issue in multiple disciplines going on?
In the last six months, I have read Lexington about the horse.
I've read the first Kentucky Derby. I've read a book called Kelso.
And I can assure you that the demands of racing were much harder on horses.
(19:07):
Lexington is a perfect example. example, this is a horse who raced and let's
see, the first Kentucky Derby was 1975.
That was the year that he died in 25 then. And so he started racing or he was
born in 1950 and the races that he ran in were four mile heats and you had to
win at least two of them on a card to be declared the winner of that four mile heat.
(19:31):
And so there were days that he raced 12 miles because if he won the first heat
and another horse won the second heat, then there had to be a third heat and
there was 45 minutes in between.
And so I think we've come a long way. I think we are much easier on horses.
Now the distances have gotten shorter.
We've changed racing surfaces. Back in that era, we only had dirt and it was
(19:53):
more like a plowed field than what on today's manicured racetracks.
Today we've got synthetic, we've got turf, we've got, again,
really well, highly monitored dirt dirt racetracks.
And in third red racing, would he have made the sport safer since 2009 and definitely safer since 1850?
So knowing that the statistics of catastrophic injuries percentage wise with
(20:19):
starts going down as well, my understanding is we can't completely get rid of
catastrophic injuries.
So how do we cope with that? The NTRA just released a new commercial that's
going to run Derby Week and I think on the Derby coverage and it's a safety
(20:40):
first video that goes into all the technology that horse racing is using now
to try to keep horses safe.
But I do think that we need to be more proactive in the messaging.
I don't think it's ever a good idea to say that we're going to get to zero.
We can always say that our goal is zero and it's always going to be our goal
is to get to zero catastrophic injuries. But I think it's an unrealistic...
(21:04):
Expectation, given the fact that at the end of the day, catastrophic injuries are in fact very rare.
So at this point, I think it's 1.26 per 1,000 starts, which means that more
than 99% of the time, a catastrophic injury does not occur.
Then when a catastrophic injury does occur, it has very little in common with
(21:25):
the one that happened prior to it.
So maybe one horse has a fatal injury on the dirt course, another one on the
dirt course, another one on a sloppy racetrack on the dirt course,
another one on a fast racetrack on the dirt course.
So now you've got three different surfaces that we're talking about minimum
and different places on the track.
One of them was at the half mile pole. The other one was at the quarter pole.
(21:47):
The other one was just past the wire.
Now we've got that variable and then different sites of injury on the horse.
One horse broke its shoulder.
Another horse blew its stifle out. Another horse has a broken fetlock.
And so because the injuries themselves are in fact rare and then rarely have
anything in common, it's very difficult to hone in on exactly the cause of the injury.
(22:12):
And it's probably different in every single horse.
And most of the time it's the straw that broke the camel's back and it's a cumulative
issue and not something that just suddenly happened.
And where where our technology is right now and where our best chance lies is
in trying to find predictive technology.
And that's what they're using now, stride safe technology that monitors a horse's
(22:35):
stride, gives you a green, yellow, or red light based on the horse's stride
from one day to the next. And so.
In thoroughbred racing anyway, they are starting to incorporate predictive technology
and software that can help us to see that a horse's stride or maybe even just
statistics like heart rate variability are different.
(22:56):
One thing that I wanted to point out on this, on what we just talked about,
what Donna just talked about, is that because I have a training business,
I work with show horses right now.
And I see a lot of horses where I'm working on rehabilitation.
Behavior problem, and things like that. And we see with these racing devices,
some of these devices start to trickle down into the show horses.
(23:18):
And that's something that I definitely
really appreciate in terms of cross-discipline exposure that I have.
Yuki, I'm wondering if you might want to speak about current research in racing the young horses.
So, once I transitioned out of racing and I started to get back into the show
horses and I got involved with the training aspect of it,
(23:39):
a lot of the show horse people that I worked with had the perspective that the
race horses were started just much too early.
And there's a lot of research that supports that
they actually started at exactly the
right time in that two or three year old year
we start to train them and it's in large part because the way that the bone
(24:03):
develops in that time that it's still in a growth stage the horse has different
growth plates throughout the body and as those growth plates fused they become
more of of an adult, right?
The bone starts to become more of a remodeling type function as opposed to a
gross function, whether it's laying down new bone.
(24:26):
In an adult horse, the gross remodeling is more like arthritis.
Remodeling, fractional repair. In younger horses, they're working on,
okay, what type of activity is this bone receiving and how can we change this
bone to make it stronger?
And so in these young race horses, what studies have shown is that when we start
(24:51):
to train them at that time, when we start to compete them in terms of what they
can do as an individual horse,
and it's an appropriate readactivity for them, for what that individual horse
can handle, then you have a horse that lays down a bone that is stronger and
thicker as opposed to longer and a little bit more fragile.
(25:14):
I was just going to say the reality is that the stress on the bone is what causes the remodeling.
And without the stress on the bone, you don't get that same cartilage rebuilding
and remodeling that you get.
And the stress on the bone, and it's a fine line, Trudy, between enough stress and too much stress.
And that's where horse trainers come in, in their expertise.
They have found, and it was Dr.
(25:35):
Bramlage's research, that if you are not stressing the bone,
meaning getting speed work in that horse that is causing stress to the bone
at that age of development, age two.
At that age of bone development, then you end up with a horse that is structurally
less sound than a horse that was able to do that bone remodeling because of the stress at age two.
(26:00):
And that isn't necessarily true for all breeds, right? Thoroughbreds,
they develop more quickly.
And in fact, there are countries like in Australia that are developing thoroughbreds
where they're maturing actually sooner than the ones here.
And so there's breeding manipulation, there's bloodline manipulation,
(26:20):
how soon a horse matures and at what stage is that horse ready to start training.
Sometimes that is not just a physical issue. Sometimes it's a mental issue and
that horse is just too immature to handle the basic early development of training requirements.
The warm blunts, they take longer to mature.
(26:42):
Draft horses take longer to mature. Arabian horses are slower or mentally too mature.
So it really runs the gamut. What is necessarily true for one breed or one discipline
is not necessarily going to be true for another.
I think that's a good perspective to take when you're looking cross-discipline
at what other people are doing with their horses.
(27:04):
Yeah. And I think one of the main reasons for that is because in the dressage
world where they don't really allow a horse to do the exercises for a pia or
passage until they're older,
it's because they don't really have the muscle foundation for it yet.
And so they can't do it correctly.
So they don't want to teach them to do it at a young age incorrectly.
And I could be wrong about some of that because this is definitely not my world.
(27:27):
But I do have a respect for staying horses at the highest level of dressage
when they are at the best.
And so my understanding is that they have to wait to let them develop to do
those because of the muscles, but not so much because of the bones.
And they're never going to be asked to do speed work, at least hopefully.
We're hoping not to do speed work on dressage horses. Absolutely.
(27:49):
It's also really important that they can mentally handle it as well.
And you can make argument that racing is way more straightforward than dressage
because it's who gets past the post first,
whereas in dressage, it's very subjective and we have the cultural issue now
(28:10):
of judging and how that shows up.
Going back to if we look at catastrophic breakdowns not being a result of of
inhumane treatment and that there's no particular common denominator.
How effective is the medication testing?
We know it's highly sensitive in the horse racing industry.
(28:34):
Are we missing something else? If we're missing something else,
I don't think it's related to medication.
We do have a lot of predictive models right now about what horses are more likely
to have a catastrophic injury. For instance, if a horse has ever been on a vet's list.
So if the horse has ever been on the vet's list, and it's very easy to get on
the vet's list in thoroughbred racing, all you have to do is have a bad performance.
(28:56):
Let's say a horse runs a bad race, and we call that a DNF, did not finish,
and they run behind the field, they're on the vet's list.
If they're having a morning work, and for some reason they pull up partway through
that work, they're on the vet's list.
And so it's very easy for a horse to get on the vet's list.
Not super easy to get off the vet's list, but our predictive models are indicating
that horses who've been on the vets list, which stands to reason,
(29:19):
are at higher risk for an injury.
But as far as the medications go, I can't imagine a cleaner sport than horse racing right now.
The Horse Racing Integrity and Safety Authority came on board a couple of years ago.
And in speaking with Lisa Lazarus, who's the CEO of what's called HISA,
the acronym for the authority, she said that quite frankly, some of the racing
(29:42):
jurisdictions in different states were testing for.
Maybe three, four, five drugs, maybe up to 20.
And HISA tests for up to 200 different drugs.
And so they essentially warned different racing jurisdictions in advance,
you better clean it up because we are going to be having much more rigorous
(30:03):
testing than you've ever had before.
A lot of racing jurisdictions, trainers for that matter, didn't realize that
their testing wasn't that comprehensive.
And so they weren't necessarily getting away with anything before because they
didn't know that they could have gotten away with something.
But the other thing that they're doing is that just like in the Olympic sports
or other sports, they're freezing samples.
(30:23):
And yeah, there may be things that you are using right now that we can't test for.
But when the technology gets there, we will go back and test these frozen samples
and you'll be punished as if it just happened.
I think a great example of that is the use of bisphosphonates.
They were, we didn't have testing available for that beyond 30 days.
Now just recently we kept testing about the year mark where we can detect dysphosphonates
(30:48):
and within the system of the horse and that was one that a few years ago was
being attributed to a few of the catastrophic breakdowns that were happening.
Yeah so this is a drug that was used specifically for older horses to treat
a disorder called nyspnebicular which anybody who's ever had horses knows what
that is but people were using it off label to treat other soundness issues and
(31:11):
And what they learned is especially in using it in young horses,
for any reason whatsoever,
it causes that bone remodeling that we were talking about earlier to not happen
properly and leads to eventual more unsoundness than they would otherwise have.
We all have the privilege and pleasure of having horses in our lives on a daily basis.
(31:33):
And so I just want to acknowledge that we can't tell spectators of horse racing
or any horse sports to ignore their distress when they see an animal suffering.
So normalizing the response to the distress that we might see on the news.
(31:55):
How could we in the horse industry and horse lovers educate and both support
the general public about equine welfare and how to understand coping with anger or grief?
I would hope that we never normalize it. But one of the examples that I've used
is that thousands of people die in automobile accidents every single day.
(32:16):
And if we We had to watch on the news every single day a child laying dead on the side of the road.
I don't think we'd ever be able to strap our children into cars and take them
to hockey practice or to school every day.
So we realize that driving cars is not 100% safe and that there are inherent
risks involved with that, but we don't let it stop us from doing something that
(32:38):
we feel is necessary, which is driving our kids to school or to practices.
And where horses are concerned, the thing is that people, I think,
have a tendency to think, with horse racing especially,
it's low-hanging fruit because the majority of our catastrophic injuries are
recorded incidents in a race where there's video footage of it.
(33:00):
And so it's very easy for animal rights extremists to run those videos back
and say, this is what horse racing is doing, while not pointing out the fact
that it is still exceedingly rare for that to happen. and.
I was at Saratoga this past summer. One of my best friends was in town and she
does not have a horse racing background.
She likes horse racing, but she's never ridden a horse and she likes to come
(33:22):
back on the horses. And there was a catastrophic injury that day and it upset her.
And I understood that it upset her. We were going to dinner with some people
after the races and on our way to dinner, she said, look, I just need you to
know that I'm not okay yet. And I do need to talk about this later.
And I said, I am here for you. We'll talk about it later. And so after dinner,
she said, I need to know about that happening.
(33:45):
Is that a frequent occurrence in horse racing? And I said, no.
And I gave her the statistics that I've already talked about.
More than 99% of the time, it doesn't happen.
But the reality is that it does happen in the wild.
It happens in the wild more often than it happens on racetracks.
And in the wild, when a horse has a catastrophic injury, the ending is far more
(34:08):
cruel than what we see on the racetrack.
So on the racetrack, we have immediate humane euthanasia.
If a horse has a compound fracture, meaning the skin is broke,
we know that the infection and the chance of infection is far too great to try
to heal the, even if you could put a cast on it, the horse has to be able to
bear weight on that leg, at least some amount of weight or else it's going to founder.
(34:32):
It's going to die of laminitis, I'm going to call it.
It's going to have just a longer time of suffering.
So we know that in some of these injuries, humane euthanasia is the very first and only approach.
But there are many injuries that happen to horses that they do recover from
and that we do splint or we do find a way to bring them back or they have surgery.
(34:54):
I do think that the focus tends to be on the catastrophic injuries and how tragic
that That is, and people don't realize that these catastrophic injuries happen in fields,
happen with brood mares, happen with foals, and also happen with horses out in the wild.
I also think it'd be helpful to find ways of supporting people watching this
(35:18):
or looking at news articles and maybe teaching them coping strategies,
understanding the process of what goes on and why this is happening. Also.
The news media is very focused on negative news stories in general.
And we know the world is in crisis. There is war and natural disasters and kids
(35:42):
dying of fentanyl overdoses, including what are we doing for horses that's good?
Why are we all invested in the horse-human bond? What's so amazing about them?
I know when I come back, I want to be Yuki's horse because I'm sure you're good.
(36:02):
Yours is too. I've never worked for a horse trainer on the racetrack who isn't
good to their horses, but the thoroughbred horses have a good life.
And I know the same is true in the show world. There's going to be a bad apple
in every sport, every organization, and you're always going to be able to point
to somebody who is not good to their horses.
But at least on the racetrack, I can tell you a few examples where,
(36:25):
in fact, one was a woman horse trainer who was beating her of horses.
It was tied to the back of a stall with a rake and the horse reared up and flipped. It was horrible.
I watched the video one time and I could never watch it again.
She was initially, one of her employees recorded the video to turn her in because it's rare.
(36:46):
It's just not something that you get desensitized to see that sort of mistreatment of an animal.
So one of her employees turned her in and the stewards originally banned her
for 30 days, but the public outcry from within in the industry was that this
woman needed to be banned for life, never touch a thoroughbred in our industry again.
And she subsequently was banned for life because it's just not something that
(37:10):
99% of the people in the industry can tolerate.
I know there's an encouraging whistleblowers. There is a hotline with the horse
integrity welfare unit that people can call in anonymous tips.
And I know that's not necessarily the case in other horse sports.
Hopefully that can be a model for others. And Trudy, you're referring to HIWU,
(37:35):
the Horse Racing Integrity and Welfare Unit, which is a branch of HISA.
So HIWU is the organization that HISA employed to do the testing procedures
and to do boots on the ground investigation. Thanks.
I'll add a link to them in our show notes as well.
Yuki, you named in the very beginning of our conversation about your grandfather
(37:57):
was interested in economic growth and the horse sports, it's an industry, right?
There is a huge economic impact with jobs.
I do know that there is this elitist look at some horse sports because it's
very expensive and there are some great organizations out there that are promoting
(38:18):
horse sports for underserved populations in particular.
Like the Ed Brown Society has scholarships for including African-Americans in
the horse racing industry.
I'm wondering, how can we include more of the general public having access to horse sports?
(38:40):
I think there's more and more studies coming out these days that show just how
symbiotic our Our relationship and the benefit is between horses and humans, much they can improve.
The environment for disadvantaged children and how can we make this more available to.
(39:01):
To to kids but also to what
what is their effect on ptsd rates i
remember a study the other day where the improvement to
ptsd in the vietnam war vets when
they started working with horses and these are veterans that have had
teach severe ptsd for 40 some
years is is something in
(39:23):
the range of like 70 to 80 percent within a
couple of months time just for working with
horses so there's a huge benefit not just the
economic impact of the the racing industry it's a big driver of the economy
and in a lot of places not just here in the states but all over the world yeah
i don't have the statistics in front of me but the united states horse council
(39:47):
has these statistics and not
just the economy driver that it is, but also the green space driver.
Think about all the green space that horses use, whether it's breeding horses
or just young horses or just horses that are retired.
All the green space that they require that if that green space goes away,
could turn into land development.
(40:08):
And quite frankly, I like the green space.
That's right. And it seems unrealistic when people say, let the horses be free,
send them to a sanctuary.
That is not possible. We can look at the plight of wild horses as a disaster
because they're in concrete pens.
There's so many of them and they're contained together.
(40:31):
So keeping horses as part of our culture, we have a long co-evolution with them.
And that seems to be key in...
Maintaining our sports in all the different equestrian disciplines.
I think without that relationship, it's in our DNA, Trudy. At the end of the day, it's in our DNA.
(40:53):
There's so many things that people talk about. I'll give you a for example.
Here in Kentucky, I had the opportunity to ride some of the Icelandic courses,
which I don't know if you all have ridden them, but they are about Welsh pony
size, maybe around 14 hands.
And they are a very docile breed
very friendly and they have
(41:13):
these unique strides where they can do a pacing stride and
a trotting stride they can also just do a regular gallop but they're really
quite unique horses and the woman who breeds this Icelandic breed here in the
United or here in Kentucky the horses that the horse that I rode that day and
the horses that she has with the exception of just maybe one or two breeding
(41:34):
stock that she got from Iceland were
all born and raised in the United States.
And she said that the only thing that spooks the horses from Iceland are trees
because it's the one thing they don't have in Iceland.
And so they're not used to seeing trees. But even these Icelandic breeds who
were born in the United States and have seen trees their whole life,
if they come out of a, they're in a field and all of a sudden they approach trees,
(41:57):
they immediately spook at the trees because it's in their DNA.
Just like it's in our DNA to have a symbiotic relationship with horses where
we take care of the horses and the horses take care of us.
And I don't think that's going to go away anytime soon.
I think speaking from a purely sport perspective as well, this is really a team sport.
(42:18):
I think a lot of people look at this like it's an individual sport and it's just you on your horse.
We talk about the jockey that won, but really it's about the horse that won.
And that partnership, not just between the rider and the horse,
but there's always a team of people that help to make that happen.
It's the same with corsage, with jumping. It's a partnership.
(42:41):
It's no matter the discipline, we're dancing with another individual.
And in order to make it beautiful, visually from the ground,
in order to make that it's not just about the movement, there is some gaiety,
some joie de vivre in dancing with your horse, right?
And this is part of what brings joy and has brought joy to mankind,
(43:02):
why horses have made people so happy for thousands of years,
why we're able to take them at one point into war, now competing.
And even in what Trudy had mentioned earlier, in this therapeutic setting,
we have now horses that are shielding humans and doing just unbelievable things in a therapy setting.
(43:24):
They're tremendous. We can't do anything but put them first.
And I think if you're a horseman, you're putting your horses first.
This connection with the natural world through horses is so powerful.
Donna, you were talking about green space and Yuki, you're mentioning the therapeutic aspect.
And this morning while I was drinking my tea, I was scrolling through Instagram
(43:47):
and I follow this account called Inside the Backstretch.
People were commenting who work
in the backside of the industry about what they enjoy about their work.
And so much of it was the sensory experience, like the embodied experience of
the smells of the barn and just being with the horses and how it makes people
(44:11):
feel relaxed and comfortable and connected and grounded.
That cannot be underestimated. well the thing about the horse is that you just
show up as you are right like i think with so many people and jobs and workplaces
people are expected to show up in a way that doesn't feel.
True to them and with a horse if you don't show up in a way that feels true
(44:34):
to the horse and to you you're immediately exposed and so you you immediately
have to just drop whatever emotion that you brought that isn't just an interaction
between you and the horse so if you show up
angry or you show up frustrated, that horse knows that you're angry and it doesn't
know that you're not angry at it.
(44:55):
And so it automatically is standoffish from you and it makes you dispel that
anger and go, okay, that's right. I'm here. I'm with you.
That thing that made me angry isn't here anymore.
And so it just helps you to start to unload that baggage that isn't helpful
in the interaction that you have with the horse.
I find it very grounding just to be outside and with the horses at the end of the day.
(45:19):
Yuki, I know that your horse also has a special gift as a therapeutic horse.
Yes, he does. Thanks to you. I'm so glad that he gets to work with you. He genuinely loves it.
There's always that aspect of it. When Donna had mentioned earlier that we can't
make these horses do, we can't force them to compete.
(45:40):
It really does take a partnership. They really enjoy the horses that I've been
fortunate enough to get on the racetrack and all through my riding career,
whether it's show horses or in racing.
The ones that do well are the ones that have been taught. They know the game.
They become very proficient with it. They've had the good support and they look
(46:00):
forward to it. Everyone loves that.
And probably who shows has had that experience where they've had a show horse
that can't wait to get into the ring.
They're maybe even two different personalities outside
of the ring and training and then they get into the show ring and they're
on point they're perfect you've never seen
this horse before right and it becomes one of your favorite show horses because
(46:22):
of that and same with the racing i'm wondering if both of you might share some
of your experiences of actually riding in races and anything that is standing
out for you as an amazing visceral experience of being
connected with a horse in a harmonious way.
Oh, God, there's so many stories, Trudy. Like when you, I won over a thousand
(46:45):
races, which means I rode over 10,000 races.
I can tell you one story that's funny is that there was this horse named David's
Diamond that I was up at Rockingham Park and I had the bug, meaning I was an apprentice rider.
And the trainer asked me if I'd gallop the horse one morning.
And I really didn't want that to go well because I didn't want the trainer to
(47:06):
ask me to gallop the horse every day. it.
And I knew the horse was a little bit of a runoff, meaning he would just take
off. And I thought, I'm just going to let him go.
Like he'll just run off with me. And then the trainer won't ever ask me to come
galloping again and it'll be perfect.
So I jogged him off for a little bit and like I jogged him off for a good quarter of a mile.
So he would be warmed up before he just took off. And then I just throw him
(47:29):
his head and he took off for a 16th of a mile.
And then he came back to me and then just galloped a pony horse around there.
When I came back to train, it was like, oh my God, he's never gone that well
for anybody. Can you come get him tomorrow?
So sometimes you're like, that's it. I'm just going to let the horse do whatever
it wants. And you let the horse do whatever it wants. And turns out you guys
(47:50):
actually both want the same thing.
That's right. I think in terms of my own experiences,
whether it's racing or the show horses, the highest high that I always get is
when I really am connected to that horse that I'm on. We're really moving as one.
The aids become very light, very subtle, and the joy, right?
(48:14):
There's a great joy in that community between rider and animal.
There's nothing like it. And
I know that I speak for every horseman out there. That's where it's at.
When people ask who your favorite horse is, I always tell people that what we
love about horses is the communication.
So our favorite horses are always going to be the horses who are most willing to communicate with us.
(48:38):
And sometimes you have to work for their trust in order to get that.
It's not an automatic, but when you get that level of communication to another
level, that's when it becomes really a gratifying relationship.
That's right. And that actually was one of the big drivers of transitioning
into training being a very easy thing for me is when there is a problem,
(48:59):
trying to figure out what that is. Because sometimes it is behavior.
Sometimes it's a physical problem. Sometimes it's an equipment problem.
Being able to figure those things out and then develop that horse in a way that
really brings out its personality and makes it communicate more is a huge victory.
And Yuki talked about transitioning to training.
(49:22):
And I'd love to hear from both of you about your transitioning from both being
jockeys and then because Yuki, you're still working more on the backside and
Donna, you're very much in the forefront of the industry.
So how was that transition for both of you?
For me, it was road horses professionally for 26 years.
(49:44):
I galloped horses in the morning for four and a half years before I became a
jockey. I was a jockey for 12 years and then galloped horses for my husband
after I retired from being a jockey until 2009.
And during that time, in 2000, I went to work for NBC Sports and also started
doing some of the interviews from horseback.
(50:04):
And so for me, it never felt like a transition because I had both of those things
in my life simultaneously.
I thought when my husband retired in 2009 and I wasn't going to gallop horses
anymore, more, I thought I would really miss it.
And I thought if I miss it, I can always go back to work. And so luckily a year
before that, I got a dog and we would go trail running all the time.
(50:27):
And a month or two went by and I really didn't miss riding horses day in and day out.
And I realized that it was because I still had that interaction with animals
and I still was outside on a daily basis. And that was important too.
And at the end of the day, the horses that I rode are thoroughbreds and thoroughbreds
are fun and they're explosive and they're fast and they're all of those things,
(50:49):
but they can be more dangerous than other horses. And,
I rode those horses for 26 years and no, I don't want to go trail riding.
No, I don't want to take somebody's little quarter horse and go ride around in a pen.
I'm used to riding a Ferrari, but I don't feel like I want to ride Ferraris anymore.
It doesn't feel that safe. And so I love that I get to go play around on a nice,
(51:11):
it's always usually a quarter horse or a horse that is a lead pony when I'm
covering the races on NBC and I'm on horseback.
I'm on what we call pretty bomb-proof horses. and those are horses that it's
nice to just be out there on the track and enjoy that interaction with the horse
but at the end of the day I give that horse back to its owner and they have
a groom that takes care of it and I don't have to take care of all that.
(51:34):
You certainly paid your dues there and so Yuki what was the transition like for you?
I'll be honest the transition for me was I wanted to go back to college because
I had spent riding years listening to girlfriends that were in college to see how fun it was.
(51:56):
So I had a little incentive there, but on top of that, I also was having some
problems with keeping my weight. I had a lot of muscle.
I'm like, Donna, I build it really quickly and very easily.
And so I got heavy. And the stronger I got, the more races I rode,
the bigger I got. It was tough to make weight.
And then I also had just general wear and tear and some injuries that I was
(52:20):
having some trouble with.
So I went back to school.
I thought at the time I had, just like Donna said, I've been getting on these
Ferraris. I'll never want to, if I'm out, I'm out.
And then I think it was a few years later where I obviously couldn't stay out
because the horses are an addiction.
(52:40):
That they get in your blood and then you can't get them out.
So I think within a couple of years, I had adopted a horse of my own off of
the racetrack that I had ridden when I was still involved in racing.
And I think I've been fortunate that I've always been able to have really great
mentorship surrounded by people that are very knowledgeable,
(53:04):
very experienced, very passionate about what they do.
It's heavily influenced me. And it's not something that ever goes away.
And so that's something that I still am able to bring forward to my training environment.
And hopefully that is something that I still need to spread and pass forward.
And Yuki, naming the addiction that we all seem to have for horses in some way, shape or form.
(53:30):
And Donna, you'd mentioned about riding dangerous, explosive horses.
The reality is...
No matter how wonderful our connection is with these horses,
that sometimes because of their very nature of being prey animals,
that they can be dangerous.
Even the most docile horse can be dangerous.
(53:54):
How can people also understand that sometimes we also have to reprimand or get
a dangerous horse under control to keep themselves safe as well as us safe?
And this isn't necessarily animal cruelty. cruelty
the analogy that i use and i think is 100 true is
that they are very much like dogs and they
(54:15):
are herd animals and dogs are pack animals and there's an alpha in every herd
and in every pack and if you are not going to be the alpha then they will because
they need for a leader to step up and be present and if you don't show yourself
as a good strong leader then they will try to be a good, strong leader,
but they don't know all the dangers that lie around them.
(54:36):
And so it's very important that you step into that leadership role.
You do not step into the leadership role through cruelty. It's not even possible.
A horse will fight you at every turn. If your answer to, I'm going to be a strong
leader, is that you're going to be a dominant person with this pack,
because the pack's not going to like you. The herd's not going to like you.
(54:57):
And so you become a strong leader by, first of all, you do control their food source.
So that certainly helps, but also you reward them when they do things really
well and you reprimand behavior that they know.
First of all, you teach them expected behavior and then you reprimand lightly
and you praise effusively.
(55:18):
And so when I was taught to train my dog, I was taught in that way that anytime
a dog does something really well to praise them effusively and to reprimand without emotion.
And it's the same way with horses. You reprimand without emotion.
Just take a step back, take a step back, right? Just reprimand without emotion, but praise effusively.
(55:38):
Now, sometimes fillies can be a little bit more difficult because their idea
of a reward is don't touch me, right?
So sometimes a filly's reward is great. You did that.
We're done for the day. So you have to learn like what is a reward to one horse
versus another horse, because they're not all treats driven or however it is
that some horses don't like to be pet.
(56:00):
But at the end of the day, horses as herd animals are very much like dogs as
pack animals and they need a good leader.
And if you want to be around horses and you want them to be trusting of you
and you want them to want to follow you, you have to be that leader. Okay.
That's a great point. I think if you imagine yourself and if you've ever had
(56:25):
a personal trainer, and there's days when you don't feel like going into training,
and you're maybe a little sullen, and it's the responsibility of your personal
trainer to help get you motivated.
And that personal trainer, the personal trainers are not all created equal.
Some are going to really drive you. Some may even drive you to the point where you're injured,
(56:47):
and then maybe another Another one is going to be that perfect one for you that
even when you show up and you're cranky and you're hurting, they have the right warmup for you.
They have the right words of encouragement for you. And then you leave that workout session.
And not only are you stronger and shitter, but mentally you feel good about it.
(57:09):
You're so glad that you went, you did the training that day.
You're so glad that you have that trainer to work with. But it's very similar,
the training scenario, the training relationship that we have with our horses.
Thanks, Yuki. I was struck by a comment that Gloria Steinem had said recently
(57:29):
about the internet is not a complete picture.
Future as we commit to change in
the equine industry also hopefully educating
others about the bigger picture what
is your hope for the future obviously I think
(57:49):
one of the great barriers that we have right now is that
we don't have an agrarian society anymore so when I was
growing up not only did we have horses but all my friends had horses not all
of them but a lot of them the girls who lived in town didn't have horses but
the ones who lived out by me all had horses and so you have so few people who
grow up in an agrarian society anymore and i'm not sure that they ever will
(58:10):
understand it to be honest but i do think that we have.
10% of people who are never going to love anything about horse sports and 10%
of people who are always going to love horse sports no matter what.
And in the middle there, you've got 80%, right?
And so it's that 80% that you're trying to help them to understand that this
is a symbiotic relationship.
(58:30):
This isn't something where we are imprisoning horses and getting them to bend to our will.
And so all we can do is just keep being proactive with the message,
like keep putting videos out there of horses and people interactions that are great.
And stop putting videos out there of people putting horses in houses.
I hate these videos. People send me these videos all the time where there's
(58:52):
a horse in a house. They're not pets that belong in your home.
They are still animals that belong outside.
And I think that the more we can share that relationship, the better off we'll be.
It's going to take 10 really good interaction videos
to counteract the one negative one that they saw and it's the same way with
horses as we know you can have 10 great days in a row with a horse and that
(59:16):
one bad day is the one they're going to remember for the next three months and
so we have to keep showing up and being the best kind of person for them and
we have to keep presenting that to the public.
Donna's talking about the agrarian lifestyle and you and I we get to see each
other fairly often we're outside
in this beautiful environment and And I also think being in nature,
(59:38):
you're more connected with life and death and grief,
whereas there's a more sanitized approach to that in the cities as well.
We are disconnected from the life cycle in many ways.
So I'm curious, with your long history of horses in your blood,
how do you see hope for the future evolving?
(01:00:00):
Social media definitely has made the environment very tense.
Not just for racing, the dressage community has recently experienced this.
It would get across the board and not just really equestrian sports, right?
And I think the big thing there is that when we see something that's negative
(01:00:21):
on the news, something that really upsets us is to look for who are the people
that are helping in this situation, right?
Who are the people that know what they're doing, that are providing guidance
and see what they're saying?
It will give you a holistic feeling.
It will give you a place to say, this is what I want to see.
This is what I want to hear. and the missions who I stand behind.
(01:00:44):
Because if you just see something that's very inflammatory and you just get
very upset about it, and it's on a subject that you maybe don't know very much
about, that can give you a lot of distress.
I know it definitely does for me. And so my first action when I see something
that's very distressing to me is to start to research it.
Yeah, I think you bring up a really good point. This was Mr.
(01:01:06):
Rogers' advice, what, all through our childhood, right?
When he said, whenever you see a distressing situation, look for the helpers
because there are always helpers.
And so we saw this recently in the horses getting loose in London,
running through the streets.
One of them had fallen and had blood on it. It was a white horse that showed up very well.
But when you watch those videos that at every turn, there were people who were
(01:01:28):
jumping out there trying to slow down the horses, trying to help catch the horses.
Once the one horse ran into a bus, there were people there who were trying to help.
And so there were helpers everywhere and those same helpers aren't there out in the wild.
Horsons also do these things that aren't good for them out in the wild and there's
not always helpers there to help them through it.
(01:01:50):
Yes, I know that was a terrible freak accident as well.
I also appreciate you both showing up today and having this conversation because
clearly we've touched on some difficult issues,
as well as understanding about the passions that you both have for horses.
And so I want to express my gratitude for both of you for engaging in this conversation today.
(01:02:17):
Thanks, Trudy. It's been a pleasure to be here. Yeah, Trudy, thanks for what you do.
It's been a pleasure to talk with both of you. And thank you for your passion
for horses and horse sports.
Thanks for joining us for this episode of the InScape Quest podcast.
Podcast please don't forget to share this episode with a friend and hit that
follow button we're excited to reconnect with you on our next adventure be sure
(01:02:41):
to find us on instagram at inscape quest for more content until next time keep
exploring the inner realms.
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