As Baltimore gears up for an exciting Preakness weekend, activists are preparing to protest.
Jen Sully, the Maryland Organizer for Horseracing Wrongs, tells us the group intends to protest the second leg of Triple Crown on Saturday.
In an email Thursday evening, Sully wrote, "Just within the last couple weeks, 8 horses were killed at Churchill, home of the Kentucky Derby."
The president and CEO of the Humane Society of the United States, Kitty Block, also released a statement this week.
"With the outrageous string of horse deaths in racing, how shameful that the misleadingly named National Horsemen’s Benevolent and Protective Association has repeatedly blocked regulations that would save racehorse lives."
Meanwhile, the Maryland Jockey Club has assured that safety is a priority for the Preakness.
Following a spate of horse deaths at Laruel Park earlier this year that caused the track to shut down, and heading into the festivities surrounding the Preakness, we wanted to dig deeper.
WMAR-2 News spoke with Dr. Sarah White-Springer, an associate professor of equine physiology at Texas A&M, about how horseracing impacts the horse's body and to address some of the common issues brought up by protesters.
"This is what horses were built to do and so we just have to find the best way to manage them to make sure that we keep them healthy," she says.
White-Springer's focus is on the muscles and skeletal system of the horses and looking for ways to prevent injuries.
"Everyone in the horse industry, whether it be from a researcher to their groom, is out for the welfare of the horse, all of us are aiming to improve the welfare," she adds.
Related: Horse Racing Deaths: Breaking Down the Numbers
One of the arguments that founder and president of Horseracing Wrongs, Patrick Battuello, has brought to us is that the horses are being raced too young.
"It's the grinding of these unformed bodies that is the primary reason that these horses are breaking down at the track, it's not the track surface," he told usin an interview in late April.
Dr. White-Springer says, there's no research that supports that statement.
"The data that we have so far.. it doesn't show anything to suggest that starting them young would have detrimental impacts on their bone," she says. "And actually quite the opposite, that starting them young would make their bones stronger."
She also says that horses are built for this, having evolved as prey.
"He needs to run from something, that's going to eat him, very quickly. And so it's just amazing when you start to look at the physiology of the horse, they really are built to do this," she says.
White-Springer adds that when horses do get catastrophic injuries while racing, it's devastating for the people involved.
"I think another thing that people sometimes forget is the people that take care of these horses are of course, people, they love those horses, right. And I think sometimes people see it on TV, and they're like, 'oh, they don't care about them, they die and so whatever,'" she says. "And I'm like, that's not true, there's a crew in the back, that's bawling right now, because that just happened."
She also helped to explain the science behind why horses are euthanized for certain injuries, rather than rehabilitation.
A catastrophic injury, Dr. White-Springer explains, is one where the bone in a horse's leg breaks or fractures.
"What actually ends up happening is, if we try to rehab that bone fracture, we cause other problems with blood flow to the limb and all of these other things," she says. "This is why a lot of times if they have a bone break, it results in euthanasia, because the secondary issues that are caused from trying to rehab a quadruped that has to take weight off of a limb, especially a forelimb."
So, where a human athlete who fractures a bone might get advice from a doctor to stay off their feet and rest, that doesn't work for a racehorse.
Dr. White-Springer says that kind of treatment can lead to blood flow issues, gastrointestinal issues and laminitis, an issue in the tissue near the horse's hoof where the bone could break through the bottom of the hoof.
"Most of the time if a horse has a fracture that they think will not be able to heal without taking the weight off of that limb, that euthanasia is actually the humane option. Because the other option is to put that horse in who knows how long of a rehab situation that may become very painful for him," she says.
The much more common soft-tissue injuries, like sprains, are treatable, Dr. White-Springer tells us.
Meanwhile, activists might be doing more harm than good.
"The biggest problem I see in the industry at the moment is a lot of the decisions that are being made are driven by activists, not by science, and it ends up actually being detrimental to the animal," she says. "So you have people that aren't educated in animal behavior, making decisions about animal behavior and driving legislation that actually ends up being detrimental to the animal."