As you may know one of the horses run in the Kentucky Derby broke down immediately following the race and had to be euthanized because of a catastrophic injury. Essentially, she fractured both of her front ankles. In horses this type of injury is rarely treatable in one leg, let alone two.

PETA is calling for the jockey to be suspended from the sport of horse racing. Hello? Officials have called it a clean race in which there was minimal bumping. The owner, the trainer and track officials have not made any accusations that the jockey did anything that would have led to this horse breaking down.

I am not a huge fan of horse racing. I happen to like horses very much, in fact much of my school time was spent drawing and daydreaming horses.

I think a bigger problem is handicapping. What is up with that? Why on God’s earth would you penalize an animal that has proven statistics on winning? Because a close race is more exciting? Bullshit. I want to see the animal that is the fastest and the best based on purely what the horse and the jockey can do. I don’t want a “”fair”" race. I want an actually fair race. So what if one horse is substantially faster than the rest? I want to see that champion! As adding weight increases the amount of stress on the leg bones (duh!), I believe that this contributes to more horses breaking down on the track.

I am sure that there are other innumerable factors to horses breaking down in races. But blaming the jockey seems ridiculous. Maybe if he had run his horse into the fence or into another horse intentionally, but why on earth would he risk his own neck?

I think we need to start a new group called People for the Ethical Treatment of Jockeys. Seriously. These guys practically starve themselves to keep the weight off so that they can maneuver a 1200 pound beast down a track for under two minutes. Is that not cruel and unusual?

I still hate PETA.