They Shoot Horses, Don't They?

On the day after the Grand National, Britain’s biggest horse race, one of the more sensationalist Sunday newspapers ran the banner headline NATIONAL DISGRACE, accompanied by a photo of horses competing in the race. What this excitable organ views as a disgrace is not the fact that three perfectly healthy young horses were killed at the Aintree meeting this year, but rather the disgrace lies upon the shoulders of those who would like to see the annual carnage stopped. There were 118 arrests made at the course, as animal rights activists, a vegan mob, as one newspaper put it, tried unsuccessfully to halt the race.

Dirty laundry

The horse racing industry doesn’t like to have its dirty laundry on public display, so it does what it can to conceal its darker side, in much the same way that screens are placed around an injured horse prior to its being dispatched. But we live in a digital age where everyone has a video camera, so sickening raw footage of the slaughter is widely available across social media platforms.

Those who work with horses that are entered into the huge steeplechase might have harboured hopes that this year may just be the one; that their horse could be another Foinavon in the making. For some unfortunate beasts, the race ends not triumphantly in the parade ring, but in the bucket of a JCB, to be dumped in a skip. Because horses die most years, and with similar regularity comes the rhetoric that the deaths are a tragedy, but…

When I was a young boy, the Grand National was a big event in the homes of most people. It was the one occasion that we kids could pick out a horse, and our parents would place a modest stake on it for us. One of my earliest memories of the race is that, on the day the aforementioned Foinavon won at 100/1, a horse picked out by my younger brother, called Vulcano, fell at the third fence, and had to be euphemistically euthanised. That’s shot in everyday parlance.

People started to rail against the practice of putting horses through the ordeal of a race, which all too frequently ended with equine deaths, and with increasing pressure on those who organised the Aintree meeting steps were taken to make the race safer for horses and riders. In 2016, the length of the race was shortened from 4 miles, 4 furlongs to 4 miles, 2 furlongs, and 74 yards. In 2013, the fences themselves underwent a huge change, when the wooden posts inside were replaced by plastic ones.

62 horses killed since 2000

There have been 62 horses killed at Aintree since 2000, and there were three fatalities at the meeting just gone. Clearly, the safety measures do not offer sufficient protection to horses.

After the latest horror show, British Horseracing Association (BHA) chief executive officer Julie Harrington said: "The BHA and Aintree racecourse will now analyse the races in painstaking detail, as is the case every year, to build on our existing data and help us understand what caused these incidents."

This is a reactive response to a common outcome, which was accurately predicted on the many placards that were held by protesters. The bluntest of these predictions is you bet: they die, which came tragically true again at this year’s meeting.

But the carnage will continue. Fatalities are often played down, swept under the carpet, or dismissed as an occupational hazard. But those who abhor the suffering caused at this event are increasing in number and volume, and it becomes difficult to evade an issue when it is a hot topic all over the mainstream news channels and social media.

Of course, no amount of protesting will see the race stopped. But the more it goes on with fit and healthy horses having their lives ended via a heavy fall or, in place of a bullet these days, an intravenous injection that will result in death, the more pressure will come to bear on those with the power to change things. After all, promising to analyse data has a hollow ring to it when there is data available from over sixty fatalities since 2000. I doubt anything new will turn up in this latest batch.