This week is National Racehorse Week: a week of promotion by the racing industry to mitigate criticism of its atrocious horse welfare record.
We have just spent the last two weeks focusing on the plight of greyhounds forced to race, and encouraging people to sign our petition to ban greyhound racing. Like greyhounds, horses endure painful injuries, horrifying deaths, and the risk of being discarded once no longer able to run fast enough.
Over the first six months of this year, 100 horses were killed as a result of racing on British racecourses. There were 267 breaches of whip regulations, as horses are currently allowed to be whipped six times in a flat race and seven times in a National Hunt (or ‘jump’ race). Breaches of these regulations included horses being whipped excessively and ‘in the incorrect place’. Despite industry rhetoric, there is no ‘correct’ place to whip a horse, no ‘acceptable’ number of times to whip a horse, and no ethical reason as to why beating a horse during a public entertainment event can be justified.
From January to May, 317 horses with racing industry passports were sent to slaughter. 186 of these were just five years old or younger. Slaughter is categorically not euthanasia. It involves stressful transportation, a potential further delay in lairage (which causes confusion and stress), and death by the use of a firearm with a freebullet, or by the use of a captive-bolt gun to the head.
The figures above make a mockery of National Racehorse Week, and the latest phase of the industry’s marketing campaign Horse PWR. These initiatives are merely welfare-washing exercises designed to distract the public from the racing industry’s appalling welfare record, and the suffering horses endure every single day.
The industry continues to peddle the fairytale that horse racing is an idyllic sport where horses are ‘treated like kings’. The reality is far more disturbing.
