OVER-RACING A GREAT EVIL.

Otago Witness, Issue 2356, 20 April 1899, Page 36

OVER-RACING A GREAT EVIL.

"Writing in the Now York Spirit of the Times, Mr W. S. Vosburgh, an eminent authority, saye : — To my mind the greateat evil< of our time is that horses are over-raced. There are some which seem to thrive with frequent racing, George Keene, at the Wdatchester Autumn meeting, for example. But iam not dealing with exceptions. I am aware, too, that training has been revolutionised of late years, trainers finding it more profitable to keep their horses in condition by public racing and less work in private. Nevertheless the amount of racing a horse does nowadays is enormous, and must impair his powers. It accounts for much of the '" in-and-out " racing. He is raced until he is stale, then he is rested. With the rest he "fills up," and when next he starts he is short of work, and is beaten. But a race or two does him good — it puts him '' on edge " — and when he starts again and wins, -it is called a " reversal of form." But the constant racking with brief intervals of rest renders his utter collapse only a question of two or at meet three seasons, unless indeed he is one I of the lower order of horses that cannot race 1 fast enough to injure themselves. The outcome is that we have fewer four and five-year-old horses of the better class than we formerly had. One way to remedy the evil is to make 1 the leading stake events sufficiently valuable ; to induce owners to" reserve their horses for ' them. Even that would only be a partial remedy, as many owners " like tp see their 1 horses start," as they phrase it, and are con- . tent to race ofteil for races of moderate value ' so long as they can have the added pleasure ] of " having a Det "on." If we had less racing ; we would hare better horses and better racing, j but the public demand for amusement is too great to permit a reduction of the racing. . At all events, the excessive racing produced last year a state of affairs so startling that many were filqwuto realise it. I allude to the fact that the four and five year old horses were so t jaded from the effects of over-racing in prej vious years that the three-year-old colts emild 1 give away their year in weight and beat them.