I have never paid attention to horse-racing ever in my life, but the events of this past weekend have got the wheels spinning a little in my head.

So Eight Belles, one of the horses running in the Kentucky Derby, broke two ankles during the race and was euthanized on the racetrack. My reaction was to immediately question why this horse couldn’t simply have been allowed to live and see her ankles heal and simply hang out in a field the rest of her life. What I found online is that horses generally can’t heal from broken legs and ankles, and not euthanizing a horse after such an injury would actually amount to torture as the healing process for a horse is very painful and oftentimes fatal.

So naturally, my second question was – seriously? If these injuries, which you hear about often enough for the general public to know racehorses are euthanized, are relatively common, why do we have horse racing at all? Isn’t that somewhat needless?

And again the Internets provided the answer. Horses run in the wild as well, and they in fact race each other naturally, so doing so on a track is pretty much giving them a place to do it, and also allows people to get some enjoyment and cash out of it. OK, that makes sense I suppose. There seems to be some acknowledgment that breeding racehorses does result in animals that are a bit more likely to break a bone, and while that doesn’t exactly seem ethical, I’m really not an expert on the matter, and it’s hard for me to judge what’s really acceptable without being very well acquainted with the sport.

Now if you know me, then you probably know where I’m going next. What is the major difference between supporting horse racing, a sport in which animals are bred to be more likely to die than they would be in the wild, and dogfighting, a sport in which animals are bred to be more likely to die than they would be in the wild? How are clips of dogfights shown on CNN with a warning, but the Kentucky Derby is nationally televised to an adulating audience? Why are dogfight losers considered “brutally” killed, and Eight Belles was “euthanized?” How does Michael Vick get 23 months in prison, but the owner of Eight Belles gets a letter from PETA?

And as usual, I’m not advocating for the filly’s owner to be tried as a criminal and locked up, I’m just saying, there’s somethign a little uneven here, and if you just think about what types of folks tend to be into horse racing, and what types of folks tend to be into dogfighting, and I’m just saying, the different way they get treated has more than a little bit to do with the race and relative wealth of the audience.