Friends Of Equines Society

What does BIG OIL and the  American Horse Council  have in common?

www.horsecouncil.org

Millions of dollars in tax breaks and business incentives, thats
what. Now here is a novel idea;

What if there was a vote to decide if $13.5 billion in tax breaks
for oil companies (or $129 Mil + for AHC) should go into oil
alternatives, (or TB rehome and or retirement funds?) What would you
want your Senator to do? 

Well, as you probably guessed, there was such a vote (re: Big Oil) .  We needed 60
votes to prevail, and 59 of them were in. But John McCain ducked the
vote.1

As a result, instead of powering millions of homes with clean energy
and building next-generation solar technology, we're giving
ExxonMobil and other companies billions in tax breaks at a time when
they're already making record profits.

This vote is political dynamite. And if we all pitch in, we can make
sure voters know about McCain's give-away to big oil. And it's a
twofer—we'll run the ad in the battleground state of North Carolina
to help remind voters that Senator Elizabeth Dole, who's up for re-
election, voted for big oil tax breaks, too.

Check out the ad here:

https://pol.moveon.org/donate/dolead.html?id=13514-9070569-R984_Ex&t=3

The ad links Republican support for oil tax breaks with the campaign
contributions they're taking from the oil companies.

Exposing their favors for big oil can puncture Republican promises to
help people hurting from high gas prices.

Our ad can help defeat McCain, win a filibuster-proof majority in the
Senate, and promote real solutions to the energy crisis. Can you help
put this ad on the air?


https://pol.moveon.org/donate/dolead.html?id=13514-9070569-R984_Ex&t=4

Thank you for all you do.

–Noah, Justin, Nita, Anna and the rest of the team

Source:
1. "Renewable Fuels, Consumer Protection, and Energy Efficiency Act
of 2007," U.S. Senate Roll Call Vote, December 13, 2007
http://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_call_lists/roll_call_vote_c
fm.cfm?congress=110&session=1&vote=00425&long=1


Want to support our work? We're entirely funded by our 3.2 million
members—no corporate contributions, no big checks from CEOs. And our
tiny staff ensures that small contributions go a long way. Chip in
here.

Friends of  Equines FOES of  Equine Slaughter thinks its about time for a bill like that for the "Millionaire Clubbers'" of the Equine Industries. We propose a new bill entitled  "Alternatives to Slaughter of Americas Equine Atheletes" Bill."  (ASAEA) or some such thing as that.  Do you think a bill like that would get much support? If not, why not? Only one answer: greed.

FARM BILL PASSES - FAVORS EQUINE INDUSTRY - GIVES 129 M IN TAX BREAKS

Introduction

Federal tax law treats the equine industry differently than others in several respects.  Horses must be held longer than other business assets to be subject to capital gains.  Race horse owners are required to make a decision regarding when to begin depreciating their race horses that is not based on the expected racing life of the animals.  Legislation has been introduced in prior Congresses to correct these discrepancies.

Legislation Enacted

On May 22, 2008 Congress overrode Presidents Bush’s veto of the Food, Conservation, and Energy Act of 2008, commonly known as the Farm Bill, and enacted it into law.  The new law amends the cost recovery schedules to place all race horses in the three-year category for depreciation purposes.  Effective January 1, 2009 all race horses will be depreciated over three years, regardless of their age when placed in service.  Prior to then, race horses will be depreciated over seven years if placed in service before they turn two.  If placed in service after two (24 months from foaling date), they will be depreciated over three years.  This change to the tax code will “sunset” after five years at the end of 2013, unless extended.    

Reduction of Capital Gains Holding Period

Under the federal tax code, gains from sales by individuals of property used in a trade or business, including horses, qualify for long-term capital gains and are subject to the maximum capital gains tax rate of 15%.  Since the individual tax rate can go as high as 35%, the lower rate is a real advantage. 

Unfortunately, horses held for breeding, racing, showing or draft purposes generally qualify for the 15% capital gains rate only if they are held for 24 months.  All other business assets (except cattle) qualify if held for 12 months.  Passage of this legislation would end this discriminatory treatment of horses under the tax code and allow horse owners to enjoy the reduced rate upon sale after holding the horse for 12 months, rather than twenty-four.

In order to qualify for long-term capital gain treatment, a horse cannot be held “primarily” for sale to customers.  For example, a commercial breeder, whose principal activity is breeding horses and selling the foals or yearlings, is not eligible for capital gains treatment now on the sale of the horses because they are held for sale.  In addition, a “pinhooker,” who buys yearlings and re-sells them as two-year-olds-in- training, does not realize capital gains on any gain now.

But for most breeders, who breed to race or show (even if they cull some foals/yearling), or who race or show horses and sell them, or who race or show horses and syndicate them and sell shares, shortening the capital gains holding period to twelve months should be a benefit.

Reducing the holding period by half would give these horse owners and breeders more flexibility to sell and market their horses.  It would mean that every sale of a horse which is held for at least twelve months will qualify as a capital gain or loss unless that horse is held primarily for sale.       

Making All Racehorses Eligible for Depreciation over Three Years

Presently race horses are depreciated over either three or seven years, depending on their age when “placed in service.”  A horse is generally deemed to be placed in service when it begins training, which is usually at the end of its yearling year.  Race horses over two when placed in service are depreciated over three years; if under two, they are depreciated over seven years.  (A horse is deemed to be “over two” for tax purposes twenty-four months and a day after it is foaled.)

Depreciation is a means of recovering the cost of property, including horses, used in a business through deductions of portions of the horse’s cost over a period of years.  Generally, the recovery period approximates the estimated useful life or economic life of the property.  Current law provides that racehorses that begin training at the end of their yearling year are depreciated over seven-years, even though most will not actually race for seven years. 

The legislation introduced by Senators McConnell, Bunning and Lincoln recognized the unreality of this requirement by changing the tax code to allow owners to depreciate all their race horses over three years, rather than seven, regardless of when they are placed in service.  The change provides a more equitable depreciation schedule for race horses, one that better matches the realities of the situation.  Under the new law, owners will no longer be required to depreciate their horses over seven years simply because they are placed in service at the end of their yearling year. 

The following chart, which shows what portion of the cost of a race horse is depreciated annually depending on the recovery period, illustrates the advantages of this change.

                     3-Year Property                        7-Year Property
Year One               25.0%                                      10.71%
Year Two               37.5%                                      19.13%
Year Three 25.0%                                      15.03%
Year Four              12.5%                                      12.25%
Year Five               100%                                       12.25%
Year Six                                                                 12.25%
Year Seven                                                            12.25%
Year Eight                                                               6.13%
                                                                                                   100%

Obviously, this change would allow an owner to depreciate 62.5% over the first two years a horse is in training or races, rather than 29.85%.  More importantly, this allows an owner to more accurately recover his/her costs over the period that the horse is likely to race.

President Bush vetoed the Farm Bill because of the overall cost, but Congress overrode his veto.  The change to the recovery schedule for race horses is now law, effective January 1, 2009. 

MORE GOVERNMENT FAVOR FOR  EQUINE INDUSTRY

---------------------------------- 

EQUINE INDUSTRY TO BENEFIT FROM THE  ECONOMIC STIMLUS ACT

Act Passes and Creates MORE Breeding Incentives

What Friends of Equines sees is not a problem with "unwanted" horses so much as a problem with GREED; The top 10 big-whig equine industrialists NOT wanting to contribute to the problem that they helped in great part to create, and  KEEP ON creating, and now with the help of our governments, both state & federal,...and not wanting to give to the cause of their industrys' "unwanted" horses. It is the same problem that is plagueing our entire nation, and that is the problem of the unfettered power of BIG business & corporations, special interests, pork-barrel politics and unbridled, unabashed GREED. Here is one horse-racing fan and writer that agrees with us and hits the nail on the head in this timely article called,

Concentrated Wealth Is Killing the Horse-Racing Industry -- and Horses

By Sam Pizzigati, Too Much: A Commentary on Excess and Inequality
Posted on May 13, 2008, Printed on June 13, 2008
http://www.alternet.org/story/85146/

Every year, on Kentucky Derby day, the movers and shakers of the “sport of kings” have a chance to thrill the American people — and recapture horse racing’s once-vaunted glory. This year, they fell a bit short. They didn’t dazzle Americans with the 2008 Kentucky Derby. They appalled them.

The top headlines, after this year’s “run for the roses,” went to the horse that finished second — and then promptly collapsed with two horrific broken ankles. Moments later, veterinarians euthanized the badly injured thoroughbred, the star filly Eight Belles.

Newspaper columnists, on and off the nation’s sports pages, have spent the week since the Derby decrying this latest in a long series of horse-racing fatalities. They've been fiercely debating who exactly deserves the blame. The jockey? The trainer? The entire horse-racing industry?

The blame needs to go deeper. Eight Belles actually died from a social malady, and that same malady — economic inequality — is killing off horse racing. Today's racing scene offers us up an unsettling object lesson on the heavy, even deadly, price we pay when we let staggering quantities of wealth concentrate in the pockets of a precious few.   

In our 21st century United States, we don’t talk much about this concentration. And we don’t much about horse racing either. And both these realities represent a real change in American life. Just a few generations ago, back in the 1930s, Americans cared deeply about the distribution of our national economic pie — and horse racing, too.

In fact, Americans used to follow horse racing more fervently than all other sports save baseball and boxing. Racing’s most famous horses routinely packed racetracks with 60,000 fans at a time. The legendary Seabiscuit could draw 40,000 fans just to a workout.

These glory days today seem medieval history. Most Americans these days only notice racing at Kentucky Derby time. The rest of the year, racetracks limp from day to day with a few thousand aging aficionados bouncing around in largely empty grandstands.

Horse racing’s top players have tried just about everything to bring fans back. They’ve bankrolled sophisticated marketing campaigns, hosted concerts, installed slot machines. Maybe most of all, they’ve prayed for another great horse, another Seabiscuit, that could thrill casual fans and thrust thoroughbred racing back into the limelight.

Their prayers have gone unanswered. No great new horse has captured the public imagination. And no great horse ever again will, suggest analysts like racing writer Andrew Beyer, because the really big money in the thoroughbred industry, ever since the 1980s, has come from breeding horses, not racing them.

Horses retired to stud can command, year in and year out, five- and six-figure fees for every breeding encounter. In 2006, one top sire, Storm Cat, had 111 such encounters — at $500,000 each. A single sire, in other words, can bring in tens of millions of dollars a year in breeding income, far more than the risky business of running races could ever deliver.

A victory in the Kentucky Derby, or any of the other two legs of the “Triple Crown” series that horses run as three-year-olds, used to launch the nation’s best horses into long racing careers. Now these victories launch the winning horses into lucrative breeding deals. Smarty Jones, the 2004 Kentucky Derby winner, retired right after the Triple Crown, after a career that lasted all of nine races.

This new career track for successful horses — win quick, then retire — has, in turn, changed how horse people think about breeding. Years ago, people in the racing industry valued the “soundness” of horses as much as their speed. They bred for both traits. Horses with speed but no durability made no sense to owners who wanted horses strong enough to race year after year.

But today no one needs horses to be particularly durable. They just need them to be fast, speedy enough to do well quickly as a three-year-old — and then retire to stud.

“Because buyers want horses with speed,” explains Andrew Beyer, “breeders have filled the thoroughbred species with the genes of fast but unsound horses.”

The euthanized Eight Belles had just those genes. Her Kentucky Derby-winning grandsire, journalist Edward McClelland pointed out last week, “has a record of fathering flash-in-the pan horses who run blazing times as three-year-olds, then are never seen on the track again.”

To win with fast but fragile horses, trainers have to take short-cuts. Most typically, Beyer observes, trainers pump their flawed horses with “pain-killers and other medications that are forbidden in most other countries.” These drugs “allow infirm horses to achieve success, go to stud and pass on their infirmities to the next generation.”

Racehorses, as a direct result, have become significantly more susceptible to life-threatening injury. On the same racing day that left Eight Belles dead, Washington Post sportswriter Sally Jenkins notes, “15 other horses were injured at 39 North American tracks, nine of them so seriously they had to be carried from tracks in ambulances.”

“We’re seeing more catastrophic injury now, and it’s not going away,” agrees equine surgeon Wayne McIlwraith, the past president of the nation's top horse doctor group. “There isn’t any question that when we breed for the fastest horse, we lose robustness.”

“We are at a crisis state,” sums up veterinarian Larry Bramlage. “The soundness of the horses has completely gone out the window because we don't reward it anymore.”

The rewards, instead, flow from stud fees, and these fees have been flowing ever faster over recent decades —as wealth, in society at large, has concentrated.

Racing, to be sure, has always been the “sport of kings.” But the ranks of “kings” — of super-rich investors — have expanded appreciably since the early 1980s, and many of these fabulously wealthy new “kings” have wanted in on the excitement of thoroughbred action. Their dollars have bid up prices at racehorse auctions — and turbocharged the breed-and-profit cycle.

Outstanding horses now win a few races, then get sold for megabucks to deep-pocket syndicates for breeding. To casual racing fans, horse racing has become a blur. Few horses get to stick around long enough to build an appreciable fan following.

In years past, great horses like Seabiscuit did stick around. They built their legends — and enormous public interest — over the course of long, dramatic careers. Seabiscuit himself raced 89 times over six years. Whirlaway, the 1941 Triple Crown winner, raced 60 times. Into the late 1970s, top horses routinely kept racing well after the Triple Crown series. Affirmed, the 1978 Triple Crown champ, raced 29 times.

This year’s Kentucky Derby winner, Big Brown, faces a far different future.

“The Big Brown scenario is almost too easy to predict,” Andrew Beyer wrote last week. “He’ll run brilliantly and be retired in the fall as his owners sell him for stud duty.”

Big Brown’s entire career, Beyer forecasts, will last “no more than nine races.” The fast but fragile Eight Belles didn’t even make it that long.

The racing industry can limit future Eight Belles tragedies, some reformers believe, by replacing dirt racetracks with synthetic surfaces far gentler on the stressed-out ankles of 1,500-pound thoroughbreds. Other reformers are trying to save the horse racing industry by turning tracks into gambling casinos. Income from casino games, the argument goes, can make races more rewarding.

Could solutions like these save horses and horse racing? Synthetic surfaces, the evidence appears to show, do limit the frequency of horse fatalities. But they don’t eliminate them, and, in any case, horses on U.S. tracks survived just fine, a generation ago, on all-dirt tracks.

Casino games at tracks, the evidence also shows, don’t create any new fan interest in racing. They operate instead as a de facto tax on low- and middle-income families that enriches “gaming” corporations and increases the incidence of gambling addiction.

Inequality, in short, is driving what ails thoroughbred racing. More inequality won’t fix it..

Sam Pizzigati is the editor of the online weekly Too Much, and an associate fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies.

© 2008 Too Much: A Commentary on Excess and Inequality All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/85146/

MORE ON "CONCENTRATED WEALTH," & CORPORATIONS IN THE EQUINE INDUSTRY

US: Kentucky Derby—‘ high rollers’ and social misery

By Naomi Sheehan Groce
9 May 2005

Use this version to print | Send this link by email | Email the author

Saturday’s 131st running of the Kentucky Derby at Louisville’s Churchill Downs racetrack had been promoted incessantly in the weeks leading up to the event as a “rite of spring” and another moment for the history books. The Derby Festival began last month with a military air show over Louisville lasting nearly six hours. Bank-sponsored golf tournaments dominated the festival, which culminated in the black-tie, $3,000 a table Grand Gala held at the prohibitively expensive Galt House hotel Friday night.

The $2.4 million race, lasting just over two minutes, was viewed by a national audience. Tens of thousands more Kentuckians waited all day crowded within the shadeless inside track area to watch on a big screen television. The 40-acre infield is sometimes called “‘Kentucky’s third largest city” because of the number of spectators crowded within the track. However, on Saturday it was the horse owners, breeders and celebrity speculators who dominated news coverage from their newly constructed private party suites overlooking the winner’s circle, drinking mint juleps and smoking imported cigars.

The Derby celebrations might as well have taken place on another planet, so alien and protected was the convention of “high rollers” in the midst of Kentucky’s economic crisis. Last year, the state experienced a $2 billion budget shortfall and major increases in home foreclosures, heating and transportation costs, job cuts and arrests for petty theft.

Especially in Louisville, social services are overstretched, in part because of a years-long state hiring freeze and emphasis by Governor Ernie Fletcher on “efficient and cost-effective” state government, focusing primarily on cuts in emergency and social services. According to one Louisville EMT, for nearly a year, 18 paramedics have been covering 43 positions, working for 36 hours, taking 12 to 24 hours off, and then resuming work.

Meanwhile, Kentucky’s wealthiest individuals and corporations have benefited from reductions in the top income tax rate and repeal of the corporate license tax. A special provision, the Thoroughbred Breeders Incentive Fund, was passed along with the governor’s tax modernization scheme in March. This loophole program takes millions of dollars in revenue from the 6 percent tax on stud fees out of the General Fund and gives it back to elite racehorse owners as business stimulus.

Government at all levels has padded the pockets of the National Track Racing Association (NTRA), particularly since the formation of a racehorse lobby in 2003. According to a statement from NTRA president D.G. Van Clief, Jr., “After just two years, the NTRA political action committee’s Horse PAC is in the top 10 percent of all federal PACs, raising more than $725,000 during the 2003/2004 election cycle.” Almost immediately, influential conservatives were lobbied to insert tax exemptions and specific favors into federal legislation. Bush’s American Jobs Creation Act of 2004, for example, provided a tax deduction of up to 9 percent for breeders and a tax write-off of the first $100,000 spent annually by breeders on the purchasing of horses.

In the last year, the Churchill Downs racetrack has undergone extensive renovations at a cost of $121 million, borne largely on the backs of Louisville residents. The Louisville Courier-Journal business report for April 29 stated, “Under a tax-reducing 2002 agreement, Louisville Metro owns the track and is leasing it to Churchill for $1 a year for 30 years, although Churchill can reacquire the property at any time.” Additionally, the track “is taking advantage of tax-increment financing, which created a special taxing district for the racetrack and allows the track to pay off debt using tax revenue the district generates.”

Most of the money went to build 79 private luxury suites and so-called Gold Rooms renting for $2,500 a night, off-limits to all but members of the Gold and Platinum Clubs, those placing annual bets of $100,000 and $250,000, respectively. In addition to the 20,000 square yards of suites, a huge ballroom, an inter-track wagering center, a media center, and corporate meeting rooms are all also closed to the public. Effectively, the general public is now denied access to most of the facility, prohibited from using coolers not bought at the on-site commissary, and subject to tight security and random searches.

At the 2005 Derby, 35 law enforcement and government agencies, including the Kentucky State Police, hundreds of Kentucky National Guardsmen, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the Secret Service were involved in searches of patrons and employees at entrance gates and in vehicle “sweeps.” Police forces passed through countless camera shots during NBC’s coverage, though not a breath was expended by commentators on the obvious military presence.

Since 2002, Homeland Security has utilized the event as a display of militarism as part of its nationwide campaign to spread fear and paranoia. In the process, the Bush administration has demonstrated its devotion to the ultra-wealthy at the expense of civil liberties by coordinating local law enforcement and fire departments into a phalanx of body guards for “millionaire’s row.”

Although the horse industry is touted as a tourism draw and therefore an essential component of Kentucky’s economy, the strain on the service sector caused by the annual Derby is enormous. Louisville International Airport prepared for this year’s record number of charter and private aircraft by requiring all AvCenter employees to work 12-hour shifts for the week, even on their off days. In a Louisville Courier-Journal interview, AvCenter general manager Dick Parisi related several anecdotes about the fickle demands made of employees by visiting millionaires in recent years. Most commonly, celebrities requested specific, rare wines, or butter served in “dollops” rather than in foil, although he recounted one instance in which a guest “wanted a real beef bone, sliced into chunks by a hacksaw and put on a silver platter for their dog.” After the Derby, private jets departed hastily, averaging one every two minutes.

The tremendous pressure placed on Louisville workers to cater to the horse aristocracy was not limited to industries in direct contact with race fans. In fact, nearly all workers felt the effects in the last week of the Derby Festival in the form of a 30-cent gas hike at the pumps. Seeking to capitalize on the influx of tourists, station owners hiked the average price for unleaded gasoline 10 cents over the national average of $2.20.

But the demands of Derby high-end bettors are perhaps felt most directly by those living in houses encroached upon by the sprawl of Churchill Downs. Since 1958, Gertrude and Austin Jones have lived on Homeview Avenue in a home now almost completely surrounded by Churchill parking lots. The track has offered to buy their property in order to demolish it like those of their former neighbors, but they have declined to sell, citing inadequate monetary compensation. Another Louisville resident, 80-year-old Marion Magel, has refused the $100,000 offered by Churchill last year to give up the home closest to the track, built by his father in 1923.

It is unlikely that such residents will hold out for much longer against what seems to be the inevitable invasion of corporate sprawl. One neighbor who sold the property he bought in 1970 described his predicament thus: “They almost made an offer that would get me totally out of debt, and now that I’m retired, I thought I can’t hardly turn that down.” 

***

Friends of Equines believes that there really is no such thing as an "unwanted" horse. Really now, who dosent want a horse? Ask anyone. Everybody we know, city folks as well as country folks,say the would LOVE to own a horse, "if only" they had a place to keep them or could afford their upkeep. Studies show that the majority of horse owners (not necessarily all breeders) in the USA make under $50,000 a year. So, we must ask ourselves, "where is all the money?" The answer, in the hands of the "privlidged few,"....the Industrial BIG WHIGS that call the shots,.....the biggest promoters and producers of "unwanted" horses. If indeed there are "unwanted" horses, it is those unwanted only by the industrymen who decided that that particular horse is no longer profitable for them. We must hold the monied industrymen accountable for all the "unwanted" horses they recklessly promote and/or  produce and FOIST upon the rest of the world to deal with as if they never existed.  These horse have a right to exist and you dont have to be an "animal rights extremist" to realize this,...it is just common human decency to believe in such things as the "sanctity of life," and that goes for any life, not just of humans or horses, but of all living things.  The onus is upon us as human beings to protect and preserve the sanctity of life, even animal life,  whenever and where ever we can. If this is not so, we have allowed ourselves to become no better than barbarians & pirates, exploiters of everything in our paths with NO thought to the damage we have done or are doing and continue to do.  ACCOUNTABILITY NOW!

POSSIBLE SOLUTIONS TO THE PROBLEM OF THE "UWANTED" HORSE

For One;

AMMENDMENTS TO THE FARM BILL & THE ECONOMIC STIMILUS ACT

As we have already learned above, the recently passed Farm Bill & The Economic Stimilus Act provide tax breaks and breeding incentives to the equine industry,...however, no provision was included that would protect the industries cast-off "unwanted" horses that are already allegedly "glutting the market." We, Friends of Equines, FOES of Equine Slaughter, propose ammendments to these laws that would requine an applicant to contribute a certain portion of their profits for each new horse bred  to be put towards that particular horses retirement fund as a pre-requsite to receiving any benefits from these new tax breaks and breeding incentive programs. We are going to run this idea by The American Horse Council prior to submitting a petition to our Representatives in Congress. We think they would want to be on-board with the good-guys on this one, IF they care anything about the horses. If not, well then, it will be obvious to the world, even more obvious than it is already, that they just dont really care,...and then they can quit pretending and get back to the solitary business of exploiting horses to the fullest.

***

For Two:

 Everyone Even Remotely Connected with or Profiting Off of the Equine Industry Be Required to Contribute in Some Way, i.e.; A "Sliding Scale" General Welfare Fund?

Under the laws of equity,  the greatest offenders pay the greatest amount. They who offend the most, pay the most,....just like Exxon/Valdez, GE, and other great polluters and other industrial entitys that cause havoc in societies through their carelessness and mismanagment.  And BEWARE,....industries DO have a duty-of-care to their product as well as their public!

The TOP TEN Equine Industrialists need to show the world that they are not just paying lip service to their proclaimations of caring for their horses. We must show them that it is NOT enough to care only about the horses that are still producing for them, or earning them an income still, but that it is important to care about horses they have owned previously that are danger of going to slaughter.

It is said that the racing industry "would do anything" and has tried very hard over the last decade or so to "win their good image back." It seems to us that the best thing they could do for their industry NOW is to step up to the plate and TAKE THE LEAD in the fight to END SLAUGHTER.

The TOP TEN Equine Industrialists have something to prove now (that they are not a bunch of heartless and greedy b@$t@*d$ or bIt+h%$, but that they REALLY care about THE HORSES not just THEIR HORSES but ALL horses for it is NOT but one horse that they make their living (their riches) off of, but the whole dam SPECIES! They owe it to the species,...not just select individual "favored" ones that earn them money. They need to take care of their loosers too,......anything but the slauhterhouse, euthansia and a nice grave (monument?) or a good home, not necessairily in that order.

The TOP TEN Equine Industrialists need to show the world what they are made of, especially at this point in time with the industry suffering so many black-eyes lately and attendence & profits and PR at an all time low. You would think the Industry BIG WHIGS  would want to do something as HURCULEAN as step up to the plate and get the NO MORE SLAUGHTER ball rolling so the world would "like them" again? Wouldnt it be worth the investment to them? Wouldnt it pay off for them in the long run, as an industry? Just think what a message it would send to the world: RACING INDUSTRY TAKING THE LEAD AGAINST SLAUGHTER.  Idiots. What are they waiting for? 

  Truth can only be denied for so long in the face of facts and numbers and statistics and all the bad PR the industry has been getting lately because of all breakdowns and the WONDERFUL undercover videos-showing perfectly healthy young racehorses horses going to slaughter because they are too slow. The Industrymen know the jig is up and the SMART ones will want to be on the right side of the fence when whip comes down, yes indeed they will come around to our way of (compassionate) thinking or be out-of-business and s#*!-out-of-luck if they dont "comply" and "be nicer" to the horsies.  

NOW is the time.

and the reverse says:

STOP THE SLAUGHTER NOW