There is something very East German about thoroughbred racing’s state of affairs just as the Triple Crown season commences. Not, specifically, the past year of on-track equine deaths that have been attributed to various circumstances, including drug use. Rather, the fact that the sport’s athletes—the racehorses—have no say in practices meant to boost them toward the winner’s circle.

It’s bad enough when elite human athletes choose to ingest banned substances to get that extra little edge. (And then, busted, express shock that a performance-enhancing drug could possibly have found its way into their system.) But the nagging realization that homo sapiens purposely expose unsuspecting nags to risky, illicit medication goes to a new (lower) level.

That human capacity to manipulate unwitting subjects in dastardly experiments is what sports psychologist Steven Ungerleider detailed in his 2001 book “Faust’s Gold.” From the 1960s through the ‘80s, Ungerleider reported, the former East Germany put more than 10,000 uninformed youngsters on a steroid regimen in a state-mandated quest to dominate worldwide sports events. Which led both to championship performances and long-lasting health problems.

At work then, and now in racetrack cases, was the dishonest circumvention of basic communication. The dirty little secret is that coaches and officials have been known to subject their human charges to various “vitamin” supplements without the athletes’ knowledge. A horse, meanwhile, not only does not know a Triple Crown from an eighth pole, but can’t possibly know if its trainer is spiking the oats.

Responsibility for a failed drug test therefore clearly rests with the trainer, the principal caretaker of his horses and a primary beneficiary of his horses’ success. Thus the ongoing Kentucky Derby suspension of Bob Baffert, whose horses have won that historic race four times and is third in the career earnings list with more than $385 million in purses, but who has a lengthy record of doping violations. Baffert is shouldering the blame for his colt Medina Spirit who, after winning the 2021 Derby, tested positive for a potent corticosteroid used to reduce pain and inflammation.

Obviously Medina Spirit, who died five months later, hadn’t been aware of the betamethasone in his system.

“Does a horse even know he’s in a race?” asked James Ross in a horse-sense post unrelated to doping on theconversations.com. “The answer is likely ‘no.’

“From a horse’s perspective,” Ross wrote, “there are few intrinsic rewards for winning a race. Reaching the end might mean relief from the pressure to keep galloping at high speed and hits from the jockey’s whip, but the same is true for all the horses once they pass the finishing post….there is very little direct, intrinsic benefit to the horse that would motivate it to voluntarily gallop faster to achieve this outcome.”

Logically, then, what incentive would a thoroughbred have to use substances that could endanger its future well-being—even if it somehow understood the possible competitive benefit?

The late Phil Johnson, a Hall of Fame trainer who had been a middle-distance runner in high school, once explained to me that the crucial difference in coaching a human vis-à-vis a horse is the language barrier.

“If I’m training a man to run track,” he said, “I can sit down and talk with him about his career, what he hopes to accomplish and how he can go about it. With a horse, you can’t do that. You can’t sit him down and say, ‘Look, I’m gonna kick you off the team if you don’t shape up.’”

A human runner can be advised of the benefit of extensive training, maybe even offered the suggestion of an illicit chemical enhancement. An equine runner typically is asked to take a brisk but brief morning gallop and have a nice day in the stall. Horses “can get bored a lot quicker [than humans],” Johnson said. “They can’t be told what they’re training for….and what really sours a horse is the boredom of the track.”

So good trainers are careful not to upset their horses, which are at their best when they are happy and eager to run. Thoroughbreds are not driven by the ego-centric possibility of a world record or alluring publicity or defeating a particular rival.

For a stars-in-his-eyes trainer, grasping for more money and more fame, to slip his unassuming horse a mickey—in the fashion of those old East German taskmasters—truly is a definition of “dehumanizing.” The trainer, that is.