In the interest of safety, why not have treadmills on the racetrack for the horses?

Question

You could place the treadmills side by side and the horses would run on them instead of the track. The first horse to accrue a mile and a half(or whatever) on the treadmill wins.

Answer 1

Even if the entire *track* was a giant treadmill, you would still see some injuries to the horses. Running is running, after all. The horse would still use the same joints, bones, etc. to run on a treadmill as running on a standard track. :-/

Answer 2

A big part of horse racing is making a clean break and not boxing people in or boxing others in. It's a cool idea, but it wouldn't work...

Answer 3

uneconomical and unheard of plus you would still have injuries

Answer 4

cant see how that would make things safer and it wouldnt be very exciting to watch either

Answer 5

Treadmills would more likely cause bigger and more frequent accidents, even if they were economically possible.

Problem #1 would be getting the horse to even be willing to get onto a treadmill.  Horses are fearful of strange things and will panic easily.

Problem #2 would be once you managed to get the horse onto a treadmill, would be how to keep the horse on the treadmill.  If a horse on a treadmill panics, injury would almost certainly result.  Treadmills work best with consistent rhythmic movement, and racehorses movement isn't consistently rhythmic or at consistent speed...also, treadmills aren't meant for a large animal to run at a high speed on it, treadmills are used to build up stamina by steady low speed movement on them.

Problem #3  would be IF you could get the horse to even walk onto a treadmill,and if you could safely keep the horse on the treadmill,  would be figuring out how to regulate the treadmill to respond exactly to the horse's movement.  Any slip, hesitation, etc of the treadmill itself and the horse would likely lose its balance and fall.

thats just 3 of many reasons why the idea of treadmills wouldn't work.

Most tracks btw, (especially the major tracks) are good running surfaces for race horses, a lot of work goes into laying down the different layers of track surfaces to make the track as good for the horses as possible.

Answer 6

I don't understand how that would make racing safer.  Horses could still take a bad step and fall down... and probably get stepped on by the horse next to him who can't run past him like they would in an ordinary race.