Racing Industry Is Stuck in Perpetual Post Time

Mark Abraham/European Pressphoto Agency

The death of the filly Eight Belles, left, after the Kentucky Derby cast a negative spotlight on the horse racing industry among millions of the sport’s casual fans.

Thoroughbred racing has been too slow to change.

An insular industry built on horses and gambling is out of step, out of touch and out of sync with contemporary American culture.

Even the industry’s reaction to the death of Eight Belles was typically defensive, a massive circling of the wagons. Critics were accused of not knowing the game, not knowing the sport.

Casual fans know what they see. They peek in on this world three times a year — in Louisville, this week in Baltimore and next month in New York.

The fatal misstep of Barbaro during the 2006 Preakness Stakes and now the death of Eight Belles after the 2008 Kentucky Derby compels casual viewers to look at racing as some sort of barbaric enterprise. They have seen heartbreaking accidents in two of the last three Triple Crown seasons and can draw their own conclusions.

“There is going to be a part of society that will never understand,” said Doug Reed, the director of the University of Arizona’s Race Track Industry Program. “Racing will always be a niche product.”

Reed, 52, joined Arizona’s 34-year-old program in 1994 after an extensive run in the thoroughbred industry. He has worked at nearly every level of the industry — from maintenance crew to racing official — and at tracks in a number of states, including Maryland, Florida, New Jersey, Illinois and New Mexico.

The industry has a much greater problem than convincing the public that it does not abuse animals. It needs to become a player in a booming gaming industry once again. While the gaming industry was gaining by leaps and bounds in the 1990s, racing, fat from its profits, fell behind.

“Whether it be casinos, Native American facilities, lotteries, the competition got fierce,” Reed said in a telephone interview. “And yes, the industry did probably fall asleep. Now we’ve stagnated.”

The racing industry was slow to see the changes coming, slow to anticipate the impact of casinos and lotteries. Racing felt it would be fine because it had a monopoly.

“Complacency is one of the reasons companies fail,” Reed said. “Softened by success would be the academic term. You can get complacent real easy when things are going well, and you let your guard down. I think that’s what we did. And then you’re playing catch-up.”

There was tremendous growth in the 1990s, but racetracks have not kept up. Airport terminals became shopping malls. Football and baseball stadiums and basketball arenas are like theme parks. Racetracks, however, stayed racetracks. And the industry, Reed said, “took the customer for granted.” He called it a “textbook case of complacency.”

“We were profitable, the money was rolling in,” Reed said. “Tracks did not reinvest in themselves quickly or substantially enough to keep up with the times. Customers and reinvesting are the two things they could have done better. The entertainment bar was raised, and we were too slow to react.”

One of the impediments to change is fragmentation.

“We are 30-some different states with 30-some different rulebooks regulated by 30-some different racing commissions or other regulatory governmental bodies,” Reed said.

But what tipped the scale against the industry was the perception — and the reality — that horses, the foundation of the industry, were being abused in the normal course of training and racing. The new and intense focus on animal rights has caught the industry flat-footed. Reed has noticed the change.

“Things that were not issues 20 years ago are more on people’s minds these days,” he said. “Animal rights, animal safety. Anything to do with animals. I notice it in our students.

“When I was younger, I don’t think it was talked about as much or just wasn’t at the top of my mind. Now our students talk about it, they have more concerns. Society’s consciousness — about everything — is raised to a new level.”

Can thoroughbred racing flourish in this new culture of consciousness?

To its credit, the racing industry began to do some soul-searching after Barbaro’s injury in 2006.

In October of that year, the Grayson-Jockey Club Research Foundation and the Jockey Club sponsored the first Welfare and Safety of the Racehorse Summit. In March, the second summit was held in Lexington, Ky., and several areas of concern were identified, including ways to attract and retain more regulatory veterinarians, improving track surfaces to reduce injuries and creating a research and development plan for drug testing.

“They’ve been looking at safety and welfare and duty of care,” said Reed, who attended the summit. “I wish it was 5 or 10 years earlier, but they have been looking at it. Unfortunately, it’s going to look like they’re reacting. It’s moving slowly, but that’s the nature, unfortunately, of the fragmented organizational structure of this industry.”

The struggle for thoroughbred racing is not for survival — there will always be racing. The challenge is for an outmoded industry to become relevant.

E-mail: wcr@nytimes.com

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For Mortgages Underwater, Help Swims In

ANTIOCH, Calif. -- While lawmakers in Washington struggle to solve the nation's foreclosure crisis, officials here are using a small fish to clean up some of the mess.

The Gambusia affinis is commonly known as the "mosquito fish" because of its healthy appetite for the larvae of the irritating and disease-spreading insects. Lately, the fish is being pressed into service in California, Arizona, Florida and other areas struggling with a soaring number of foreclosures.

The problem: swimming pools of abandoned homes have turned into mosquito breeding grounds.

"They are real heroes," says Josefa Cabada, a technician at the Contra Costa Mosquito & Vector Control District, a government agency. "I've never seen a mosquito in a pool with mosquito fish."

The mosquito fish is well suited for a prolonged housing slump. Hardy creatures with big appetites, they can survive in oxygen-depleted swimming pools for many months, eating up to 500 larvae a day and giving birth to 60 fry a month. That can save environmental crews from having to repeatedly spray pesticides in the pools while the houses grind through the foreclosure process.

Some local agencies, increasingly worried about mosquito-borne diseases like the West Nile Virus, are taking to the air to find problem swimming pools. The Turlock Abatement District, near Modesto, Calif., last month hired a plane to fly over 55 square miles, snapping pictures of pools from about 5,000 feet. On the ground, mosquito-control crews cross-referenced properties that had greenish-brown pools with a street map and a database of local foreclosed homes.

A significant threat to public health can be resolved through the use of a biological intervention. Learn more about the fish that eats mosquito larvae to reduce the threat of the west nile virus. WSJ's Michael Corkery reports. (May 8)

In the Turlock district alone, about 475 stagnant pools were identified on the flyover. Many of those will be filled with mosquito fish.

To deploy the fish, communities are turning to workers like Ms. Cabada, a former Navy sailor. She has raised pet fish since she was a girl and keeps a 55-gallon aquarium at home along with her five love birds, two dogs, two pet pigeons and a rooster. Many mornings, she collects hundreds of fish, housed in massive bubbling tanks at mosquito-control headquarters, and transports them to pools and other water sources in a cooler in the back of her pickup truck. In the sweltering heat, the fish ride up front.

"They're my buddies for the day,'' Ms. Cabada says.

After Hurricane Katrina

The fish have been used to keep mosquito populations down for many decades by farmers and environmental crews who stock them in cattle ponds, irrigation ditches and decorative ponds. In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, mosquito fish were stocked in the thousands of swimming pools abandoned around New Orleans in the storm.

Native to the Gulf Coast states, the mosquito fish have mouths shaped to slurp larvae off the water's surface like noodles. The females can grow up to 3 inches long, and reproduce quickly. Technicians in Contra Costa typically release about 150 fish into each pool. Within weeks, the pools teem with a thousand of the scaly, gray predators.

When Ms. Cabada released fish into a pool behind a vacant home one recent day, they darted and dove through the water, which was the color of herbal tea. "It comforts you just to see them swimming around," she says.

Located along the delta where the Sacramento River meets the salt waters of the San Francisco Bay area, Contra Costa County's warm climate makes for prime mosquito country. The area is also struggling with foreclosures. Default notices more than doubled to 4,718 in the first quarter from the previous year, according to the research firm, DataQuick Information Systems.

Turlock Mosquito Abatement District

But like everything else about the housing crisis, the fish aren't a perfect fix. They baffle some bankers and agents hired by lenders to look after the vacant homes, says Carlos Sanabria, the Contra Costa mosquito control district's operations manager. "People think some trout-size thing is going to be swimming around in there clogging up the vents," he says. "I explain it's not something you are going to have for dinner."

Not everybody likes turning swimming pools into giant aquariums. "First you have fish, then you have birds that eat them" and then bird droppings, says Arnie Shal, a retired accountant, who lives next to several foreclosed houses with pools in Clearwater, Fla. "It's not really a healthy situation."

Mr. Shal, 71 years old, recently protested the use of mosquito fish in his posh development to the neighborhood association. He fears the fish will die in the Florida heat and allow mosquitoes to breed out of control. "This is trying to fix a serious health issue on the cheap," he says, "Everyone is under budgetary pressure, I understand. But they are going to leave us bug infested."

There are other concerns. A 1999 study showed that when biologists introduced mosquito fish to a pond containing tadpoles of the California red-legged frog, which is a threatened species, the fish harassed the tadpoles and harmed their growth. The frogs that emerged from the pond were 30% smaller than frogs raised in a pond without mosquito fish.

Stubby Tadpoles

"The Gambusia just keep taking bites out of the tadpoles, and the tadpoles end up kind of stubby," says the study's author, Sharon Lawler, a professor of entomology at University of California at Davis. She says well-intentioned buyers of foreclosed houses should be cautioned not to transfer the Gambusia from a pool into a pond containing the fragile tadpoles.

In addition to raising fish, Contra Costa scientists keep an indoor colony of mosquitoes for research. It falls to the district's entomologist, Steve Schutz, to provide the insects with their regular "blood meal," which he says the females need in order to reproduce. Every week or so, he sticks his arm into a screened cage containing more than a hundred mosquitoes in a hot and humid room called the "insectary."

He usually reads a book or works on a puzzle while the mosquitoes bite him for about 20 minutes. "I have been doing it so long that it doesn't even itch that much,'' he says. The district used to use a bobwhite quail for the blood meal, but Mr. Schutz says it's less hassle to offer up his arm.

'It's Organic'

It can take months after a defaulted homeowner leaves a house before the banks start caring for the property, Mr. Sanabria says. During that time, the fish can contain the mosquito problem, while a bank hires a caretaker to drain the pool or restart the filtration system. The fish are more environmentally friendly than constant spraying with pesticides. One problem with putting a cover on the pool is that the cover's exterior can collect water and breed mosquitoes, if left unchecked.

"This is how we are supposed to take care of things,'' says Robert Kloepping, who lives next to a vacant home with a pool containing mosquito fish in Antioch, Calif. "I think it's cool, man. It's organic."

The fish face a bleak future once they've done their job. Some begin eating each other after they run out of mosquito larvae. When the houses are sold, new owners can collect the fish and return them to the mosquito-control agency. In some cases, the environmental services department in Maricopa County, Arizona offers to come back and round up the fish it dumped in pools. But most fish will probably die as home owners drain the pools or begin treating them so they can swim in them.

"That's part of the program,'' says Chris Miller, a biologist at the Contra Costa mosquito and vector control district. "They are sacrificial."

Write to Michael Corkery at michael.corkery@wsj.com

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