A bit of fun? The truth about horse racing

I remember being flabbergasted talking to someone in an animal rights group opposed to using animals in sport telling me the horses loved to race, but she later did some research and came back to me telling me how wrong she was.

Of course horses love to run around fields and paddocks, but racing is completely different. 

Now the big highly publicised events are out of the way, surely the furore around the inherent cruelties involved in racing should die down?

But horseracing goes on year round at courses all around the UK. Did you know that a horse dies on a UK racecourse every couple of days?

Animal Aid, with whom we work, have a really good tool called horsedeathwatch.com which shows the bleak statistics from the horse racing industry.  

When we watch big races on TV and we see a screen go up we know that it is highly likely a horse is about to have their life taken from them. But did you know that a lot of the injuries horses receive are survivable?

The reason horses are killed is because they will no longer be able to race and make money for their owners, it is easier to kill them and put an insurance claim in.

And who can forget the awful picture of a trainer sitting on a dead racehorse?

Was this as they claimed, just a picture taken without any malice or was it a picture taken which is representative of how these beautiful animals are commodified in the industry?

We are always staggered when exposed industries use the ‘one bad apple’ adage when the reality is the cruelties are commonplace, but this one just happened to be caught on camera. 

There are of course many other cruelties involved in this industry – many of which the public will not be aware. 

Horses are bred specially – what happens to those who don’t make the grade? What happens to those who are killed during training – after all they are bred to have specific ‘qualities’ – strong legs and bodies etc. -  but we know that many horses die from heart attacks and chest injuries and we have seen horses with blood pouring from their nose from sheer exertion.

We also know that many horses are experimented on in Newmarket in the pursuit of the faster, stronger horse – none of this is for the horses’ benefit. 

We know that when horses are retired that they don’t all end up in spacious paddocks. We have seen time and time again evidence of horses sold abroad for horse flesh, horses killed because they have no social or financial use (many of them killed in front of each other in direct contravention of the law and many of them pregnant). 

So when activists see people getting dressed up in fancy clothes and spending a fortune on what is essentially a social occasion where they will bet on horses who may or may not survive the day, you can understand why our heart sinks. 

So when you hear the old clichés about horses loving to run, being treated better than their children, horseracing isn’t a bit of fun, it’s life or death for the horses.