Don't Back the Cruelty: The Dark side of Horse Racing

It’s estimated that 420 horses are raced to death every year in the UK. About 38 per cent die on racecourses, while the others are killed as a result of training injuries, or are killed because they are no longer commercially viable.

Racehorses typically tip the scales at more than 1,000 pounds and run between 36 and 45 miles per hour. They do so on ankles much like ours, exerting a 12,000-pound load on the cannon bone alone. They do so within a pack of seven or more other horses churning around a track in a frenzy to reach the wire first. Injuries and deaths are bound to happen.

Called “Thoroughbred”, these horses are really inbred. Serious racing-related illnesses are now endemic. 82% of flat race horses older than three years of age suffer from bleeding lungs (exercise-induced pulmonary haemorrhage). Gastric ulcers are present in no fewer than 93% of horses in training, in whom the condition gets progressively worse. When horses are retired, the condition improves.

This is a murky business dressed up as glamorous. When the horses are no longer wanted, they are disposed of in a variety of ways. Earlier this year it was revealed that 100 horses a week are being killed in a Kilkenny “slaughterhouse” and then fed to the lions and tigers in Dublin Zoo. But a lot more are exported abroad to be killed in countries that will kill them for “meat”.

The industry itself seems to have a blindspot when it comes to what happens to the horses. They detail almost every other figure expect this one. One owner admitted: “A horse is a very expensive animal to keep and if they can’t race or jump and can’t reproduce, then they are not much use to anybody.

What kind of “sport” kills so many of its “competitors”? It involves running and sometimes jumping. The object is not to draw blood. If compared to other physical sports like football, rugby or even athletic running and hurdles these figures would be scandalous and rightly so.

With about 18000 horses bred for racing between the closely linked racing industries of Ireland and the UK, only about 40% will ever go on to race. About 6000 British horses leave racing every year, yet very few are properly provided for when racing ends.

So does the law of averages apply to speciesism? Most of the other laws do. 6 horses were killed on the 10th of May in Killarney. One jockey rode 2 of these killed horses. Yet no jockeys died. Nobody dying is what sport is usually about. Jockeys make up the other half of the “competitors”, those who have a choice. If 6 jockeys died that day there would be a different story told in more papers and on the front covers. This is just a comparison. It is of course fortunate that no humans died. But it is a scandal that participants who were not given a choice are now dead.

Horse racing is an exploitation activity that ruins lives and violates rights. It continues for money and the fascination of the few. It seems that any activity can be rationalized if there was enough people who would pay to see it.