PETA Statement: D.A.’s Report on Santa Anita Horse Deaths

For Immediate Release:
December 19, 2019

Contact:
David Perle 202-483-7382

Please see the statement below from PETA Senior Vice President Kathy Guillermo regarding the Los Angeles District Attorney’s Office’s report today on the 56 horses who have died at Santa Anita since July 2018:

It’s beyond credible that the district attorney doesn’t see that trainers who medicate horses obviously know that they’re injured and sore, so the trainers should be criminally culpable if they then force the animals to race to their deaths. Fortunately, the D.A. agrees with what PETA has said for the last decade: The racing industry has not done enough to protect horses on racetracks and the industry will die itself unless it does far more. Legislation to increase transparency in this secretive and deadly industry is essential, and PETA will continue to work to ban drugging, whipping, and all abuse in California and every other racing state. No sane person can find it acceptable for horses to suffer and die in a sport.

PETA—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to use for entertainment or abuse in any other way”—opposes speciesism, a human-supremacist worldview. For more information, please visit PETA.org.