Non-HISA tracks have nearly double the horse fatality rate

Tracks regulated by the Horseracing Integrity and Safety Authority (HISA) recorded 0.90 fatalities per 1,000 starts in 2024, while tracks in states that opted out of HISA — Louisiana, Texas, West Virginia, Nebraska — recorded 1.76 per 1,000 starts, nearly double. This means a horse is roughly twice as likely to die racing at a non-HISA track. The problem hurts horse owners who ship horses to these jurisdictions not realizing the safety gap, and it hurts the sport's credibility because a single catastrophic breakdown at a non-HISA track generates national headlines that taint the entire industry. This regulatory fragmentation persists because resistant states won court injunctions against HISA, the Supreme Court has yet to rule definitively on HISA's constitutionality, and state racing commissions view federal oversight as an existential threat to their authority and funding. The structural root cause is that U.S. horse racing was built on 125 years of state-level regulation, and no mechanism exists to force holdout states to adopt uniform safety standards.