UK's The Independent has opened fire on horse racing in England, revealing that there have been around 180 horse deaths in the past year.
Tyneandthyneagain died during the Grand National yesterday after unseating its jockey. The horse suffered a fatal fall at the 11th fence. It was the second casualty of this year's meeting at Aintree, the first having been Terivic, which fell and broke its back on Friday at the notorious Bechers Brook fence. The shocking death toll at the Cheltenham Festival in March, when nine horses were killed, had already made it a sad year for racing.David Muir, equine consultant to the RSPCA, tells the paper:
"Race courses will never be safe. Anything that involves jumps is not safe, because something can go wrong that has not been anticipated - but racing is a fact of life so we want to do as much as we can to help the horses."
It's a shame that racing is considered a fact of life. When it's clear that horse racing is inherently dangerous to horses, the public needs to know. Many of the sports' fans are equine lovers that see races as an extension of the horses' natural behavior. If so, they should at the very least stop supporting jump races, as those appear to be more dangerous to their beloved horses than flat racing, and is certainly less natural than horses running in groups, as they might conceivably do (without jockeys on their backs and crowds screaming in their ears) out in the wild.Unfortunately, the public won't be told how dangerous jump racing is to horses, because the industry is afraid it will damage the sport:
Dr Webbon, previously veterinary expert for the Jockey Club, said deaths and injuries had been logged by vets since 2000, and were now kept on a national database. "The figure in 2005 was the lowest number of fatal injuries on the courses since we started recording in this way. We keep extremely accurate records. Whenever the RSPCA asks for the figures we show them immediately, because it is a welfare association that wants to make racing as safe as possible for its participants."There you have it: They know there's information in there that makes their sport look bad, and they're afraid to let it out so that the public cannot be informed. Even if you can't get the details, isn't this admission enough to suggest to horse-racing fans that something is rotten in the state of Denmark?
But the RSPCA will not release the details because of an agreement with the Jockey Club, which ran the sport until last week. And a spokesman for the Jockey Club said the information would not be made public because Animal Aid "would use any specific figures as a potential tool for their cause, which is to see jump racing banned".
And this doesn't even include all the horses killed off the track, according to Animal Aid:
The group says only a third of fatalities happen on race day. "They result from a broken leg, back, neck or pelvis; fatal spinal injuries; exhaustion, heart attack or burst blood vessels. The other victims perish from training injuries or are killed after being assessed by their owners as no-hopers." Fewer than half of the 16,000 foals bred every year go racing: the rest are sold for other uses or killed for pet food, according to Animal Aid.No wonder the Jockey Club was concerned about that data falling into the hands of Animal Aid. One wonders about the future of this restrictive policy now that the new Horseracing Regulatory Authority (HRA) took over running the sport last week.
Categories: horse racing | jump racing | RSPCA | Animal Aid | Tyneandthyneagain | Grand National
