Dear Reader,

So the matter of horse racing on Sunday is back on the national agenda and once again the battle lines are drawn between the two opposing sides, largely focusing on the narrow debate about gambling rights.

Quite frankly, the issue is much deeper than whether or not gambling is good or bad. It seems to me that the more profound questions to be posed include, "What kind of society do we want to live in, and is the preservation of family life and family values necessary and important?"

I recognise that gambling is big business all over the world, controlled by powerful money interests and allegedly dominated in some jurisdictions by organised criminal networks. I'm not sure who controls what in Jamaica, but what I am fairly certain about is that the status of the "small" man who is the average gambler remains constant. To put it more bluntly, the winners are concentrated at the top of the economic pyramid and the losers bunched together at the bottom.

In his book, The Sport of Kings and the Kings of Crime, Steven Riess explores the relationship between horse racing, politics and gambling as they built New York's thoroughbred industry. I suspect that a similar study could be done in Jamaica to determine who the major players are, and the overall impact of the sport on the socio-economic dynamics of the country.

The question is, who benefits from horse racing in Jamaica, and is it good or bad for the country overall? Questions are critical in any discourse we are having about extending horse racing to Sundays.

The thing I have noticed is that proponents of Sunday horse racing focus on "freedoms" and "liberties", but never on the hazards and dangers to both man and beast.

In advocating Sunday racing, there is no discussion about the problem of compulsive gambling and the ways in which that malady adversely affects the lives of children and families. By the way there is no cure for compulsive gambling.

It's bad enough that the poorest Jamaicans from the earliest hour of the morning can be seen crammed into betting shops across the country, but it is equally disturbing to observe that most of them are males who are obviously unemployed (one wonders where the money comes from for betting), and undoubtedly with children to support. It would be interesting to see what a formal, "objective" study of the impact of gambling on the Jamaican family and society would produce.

My own experience as the daughter of a man who was a compulsive horse-racing gambler is instructive. My father lived and breathed horse racing to the detriment of our family. Every available penny he could find would go toward betting on horses, and as a result our family life suffered.

I remember my mother having to devise a strategy to get the money from my father before he hit the betting shops and I was an integral part of the scheme. I would have to waylay my father at the corner of Barry and Princess Streets, downtown Kingston, precisely when we knew he had collected his pay, and insist that we should get some of the money for groceries. It was particularly stressful when it was time to pay our school fees which required more money. I remember my dad trying to dodge and hide from me, but I would outsmart him every time. My father's gambling addiction prevented our family from achieving financial stability, and he remained a gambler up until the time of his death.

An expert on the matter concludes, "Compulsive gamblers believe they can 'beat the system' and know how to achieve gambling success. However, there are no guarantees and no 'dead certs' in gambling, and most of the time the gambler will be losing money. If they have a run of luck, they often increase their amounts of money used for betting or bet more frequently and liberally thinking they have the knack." The reality is that the winning streaks never last, and my dad was a testament to that.

But gambling on horses doesn't take its toll only on humans, the horses too suffer in the process. "The truth is that cruelty is an inherent part of the horse-racing industry. Thousands of horses are produced annually, from which a few racers are chosen. The big money is in racing the two and three-year-olds, for whom training begins at 1 1/2 years, before their bodies are fully developed and their growth plates have closed. Unnatural weight is put on their backs, concussive stress on their bones, and they are forced to submit to an over-strict training regimen. Nightmarish injuries like on-the-track fractures leave them finished by the age of 4-6, when they are barely mature. Decisions about their fate are made in the interest of the bottom-line dollar, not their health. Injured animals are loaded up on drugs to run one more race."

Add to those the practice of "slaughtering", an issue that is now being debated rigorously in the United States. Horses that are no longer "profitable" are either sold at equine auctions or sent to slaughterhouses that ship horse meat to European and Japanese markets. It's a sordid business!

Proponents of Sunday gambling need to rethink their position, hopefully recognising that the issue has broad implications for the values we have honoured in this country for generations. Jamaicans should say no to Sunday horse racing, and I suspect that if the horses could talk they too would agree with the day off.

With love,

bab2609@yahoo.com

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