A few months ago a New York Times Article was published concerning horse euthanasia. Each year, the famed Kentucky Derby is prone to horse deaths. This past year had the most deaths with 7 horses dying within 10 days of the race. 

I’ve learned during my time as a trainee that there are many reasons for horse deaths. These include but are not limited to colicing, heart failures, cancerns, a variety of diseases, and most commonly in relation to the Derby, broken legs. 

That might sound strange to us; breaking legs generally doesn’t mean death for humans. But it does for horses. This is a systemic issue that has been lingering in the horse world. The owners of these million dollar horses don’t think that “wasting” thousands of dollars on a procedure that most likely is futile is worth keeping the horse alive. 

Horses rely on their ability to stand and run. They weigh 2000 pounds and have maybe 150 pounds of legs to support all of that. If one leg breaks, that puts too much weight on the other 3, and then with that pressure, they slowly but surely break all their legs, rendering them “useless” on the race track. Thus they are euthanized. 

This is 100% a tragedy, and in my opinion, an avoidable situation. I was thinking over the past few weeks that we could potentially analyze horse behavior and predict before this happens. How would we do that? Through data science. We could potentially analyze a horse’s gait, the way they step, and create a model that predicts which gait is more prone to leading a horse to breaking their leg. 

This is certainly a large-scale project that will require a lot of work and dedication along with studies on horse’s gaits. However, there are some small scale projects on this work, which I truly love. This combines all my interests in STEM and the horse world to make the world a better place. For right now, it’s just a thought, but hopefully it can become a reality and save the lives of thousands of horses for years to come!