Amid too little COVID relief and too much pork, Congress passes good law for KY horses

For the next few weeks, reporters will be scrutinizing all the goodies that got snuck into the year-end spending bill which includes too little for federal COVID relief and too much for bizarre pet projects for lawmakers, like $35 million for sex abstinence programs, $2.4 billion for “Space Force” and yet another tax break for those suffering, down-trodden race horse owners.

One of these additions, however, is good for Kentucky, not because it’s graft or grift, but because it will bring a much-needed level of regulation and oversight to horse racing, which has been plagued by a series of doping scandals and the racetrack deaths of far too many horses in the past few years.

The Horse Racing Integrity Act, was first introduced by U.S. Rep. Andy Barr six years ago, and finally embraced by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, after Churchill Downs joined Keeneland, the Jockey Club and other major racing groups. In the end, McConnell made sure the bill was part of the larger legislation.

HISA would end the state-controlled fiefdoms of various state racing oversight groups and develop a federal anti-doping and racetrack safety program aimed at lessening race track medications. The United States Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) will be in charge of standardizing all doping and medication rules for tracks.

This is a huge step for the industry, which was signing its own death warrant with willful ignorance about the extent of over-medication and doping that many believe was leading to equine breakdowns and deaths. The sport’s most major players, the tracks, long resisted federal oversight, but they finally bowed to the inevitable. Most tracks have already started initiatives to ban race day medication, which has long been required in the rest of the world.

The bill is not perfect. According to Animal Welfare Action President Wayne Pacelle, the legislation leaves out crucial language on soring, and other practices used on Tennessee Walking Horses.

“Congress rightly took action to unwind cheating and doping in Thoroughbred racing, and this is the first Congressional reform focused on the safety of the human and non-human athletes involved in the sport,” Pacelle said. “But in a massive fumble, lawmakers threw up their hands after some animal welfare, veterinary, and horse industry groups raised irrational and specious concerns about the compromise measure to ban horse soring in America.”

But this bill is crucial to save horse racing, and the Kentucky breeding industry that supplies it. The deaths of at least 50 horses at Santa Anita since 2018 led to renewed calls to outlaw horse racing altogether.

Instead, HISA will bring more integrity, more safety, and hopefully more fans to one of our state’s signature industries.