JC / Railbird

From Frank Angst’s upcoming Thoroughbred Times cover story:

A published Australian study released in 1996 administered by the Australian Jockey Club examined ten years of racing at Randwick and Warwick Farm racetracks. It reported a fatality rate of 0.4 per 1,000 starts (1 per 2,500) in the 57,831 starts examined. But because of varying definitions of “fatal injury,” comparisons from one country to another are difficult.

For instance, in the U.S. study, the Equine Injury Database defined any injury that led to a horse’s euthanasia or death–regardless of timeframe–as a fatality. A horse that, for example, was euthanized several days or more after the actual injury was counted as a fatal injury. On the other hand, the Australian study only considered deaths or euthanasia that occurred on the track.

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The New York Times probably should have included that, no?

Posted by EJXD2 on March 26, 2010 @ 10:12 am

Thanks for the excerpt from Angst’s piece on the subject. That’s an important distinction, which probably should have been mentioned if the reporter had the info (and if he didn’t, I suppose that raises a question of propriety re: using incomplete or incompletely understood data). What I’d now like to know for comparison is, what’s the American fatality rate if it were similarly defined?

Posted by Jessica on March 30, 2010 @ 10:24 am