By LUKE SALKELD
Sprawled on the ground, limbs tangled, necks wrenched at agonising angles, the photographs of the fallen horses at Saturday’s Grand National were painful even to look at. Yet millions take pleasure in this cruel spectacle.
On Saturday the country gathered around its TV sets, anxiously clutching betting slips and sweepstakes pull-outs.
But I’m afraid I wasn’t among them. I cannot bear to watch a single moment of the race. To me, the Saturday of the Grand National is one of the most depressing days of the year.
I say this not because I am some kind of puritan killjoy but because, as a vet and animal rights specialist, I am appalled at the amount of suffering the horses have to endure.
Neptune Collonges runs clears as According to Pete and jockey Henry Haynes and On His Own and Paul Townshend fall at Bechers
Each year I dread the news of another horse having to be put down – ‘destroyed’ as some commentators thoughtlessly put it – after a gut-wrenching fall which leaves horse and rider stricken on the turf.
This weekend’s race was a particularly distressing spectacle with two horses dying after terrible falls. Nine-year-old gelding Synchronised, who won the Cheltenham Gold Cup earlier this season, broke a leg and was put down.
According to Pete was also put down after falling on the second attempt at Becher’s. Two other runners, Killyglen and Weird Al, sustained injuries during the race.
As the owners of the winning horse Neptune Collonges opened bottles of celebratory champagne in the enclosure, tarpaulin fences were being hastily erected to shield the bodies of the two fallen horses.
The Grand National might be a spectacle that captivates the British public, but for me it simply serves as a reminder of the absolute disregard for animals and their welfare which some humans seem to have.
For too long, the cruelty of the race has been blithely ignored by the horse-racing authorities and the race-going public.
It shouldn’t be like this. Sport, after all, is meant to be an uplifting activity, reflecting the quest for excellence and heroism in competition. But there is nothing remotely inspirational or heroic about forcing horses to gallop round a dangerous course at high speed and risk sustaining painful, even fatal falls.
In the Grand National alone, ten horses have been killed since 2000. And last month, the Cheltenham race meeting was overshadowed by the death of five horses.
We would not tolerate this callous approach towards human competitors.
If, in the Olympic Games, several athletes broke bones during, for example, the 3,000 metres steeplechase the event would either be dropped or the course drastically altered.
Formula 1 motor racing, radical new standards of safety were introduced following a spate of deaths in the 1970s. These included improvements to cars and better layout of tracks, measures which helped to achieve a dramatic fall in fatalities.
There is nothing like the same concern for horses’ welfare shown in the National. The deaths and injuries to the animals seem to be regarded as, at best, nothing more than inconvenient consequences of the race and at worst ‘just one of those things’.
The brutality of last year’s competition in particular – where only 19 horses finished out of a field of 40 – was compounded by the sickening sight of the exhausted horse, Ballabriggs, being whipped to the finishing line to win the race.
The central failing of the Grand National, as with all steeplechase racing, is that the horses are not physically designed by nature to leap over high fences. Their bodies are not strong enough, nor are their legs sturdy enough. Every time a horse jumps over an obstacle, especially with an added human load, it puts tremendous pressure on its two front legs as it lands.
Mankind has, of course, bred horses for specific tasks, such as mighty dray horses, with their tree trunk legs for pulling carts. But the bitter paradox of racing is that the breeding of horses for speed directly undermines their ability to cope with jumps. For what a racehorse owner wants is a thin, light creature which can move as fast as possible – exactly the type of horse most likely to be vulnerable when forced over jumps of more than five feet high.
This is slightly mitigated by the fact that the truest thoroughbreds are generally kept for the flat races, with the sturdier animals competing over the jumps.
But even so, this does not alter the fact that these National Hunt horses are still bred for speed, and therefore they are required to operate far beyond the capacity of their bodies’ skeletal strength.
The problem is compounded by the uniquely arduous nature of the Aintree course, which is four-and-a-half miles long, having been extended by half-a-mile in 1975. The horses have to jump over 30 fences, which themselves are larger than those on any other course in Britain.
In truth, the Aintree course is so demanding that, over the last decade, only 36 per cent of horses have actually been able to finish the race.
The Grand National’s defenders claim that the horses actually enjoy the races, otherwise why would they carry on racing, sometimes even when their jockey falls off?
But horses are herd animals. Out of instinct, they will try to follow the leader of the pack or continue running because that is what they have evolved and indeed been trained to do. But there is no evidence they really enjoy jumping.
The tragedy of the National is that, if people were honest enough to admit it, the greatest attraction of the race is in the element of danger and the thrill of watching the horses tackle this highly risky challenge.
How can horses be so ruthlessly exploited to feed this national habit when we claim to be proud to be more compassionate than most other countries to our animals?
Having banned fox-hunting, bear-baiting and cock-fighting, we like to think ourselves morally superior to our crueller ancestors who used to revel in these practices. But the Grand National is little different to such barbarities.
In response to animal welfare campaigners, the British Horseracing Authority introduced a few cosmetic changes to this year’s National, such as imposing a higher age limit of seven years on all horses to ensure they are fully developed and have sufficient experience, and reducing the drop on the landing side of Becher’s by a few inches. But these steps did little to protect Synchronised and According to Pete.
There is only one way to stop the suffering of the horses and that is to ban the Grand National. If racing enthusiasts truly respected these noble, majestic creatures, they would be unable to tolerate any longer such needless cruelty masquerading as sport.
News Link:-Dailymail.co.uk
“Well, if you read my post yesterday, it seems I am not the only who thought Synchronised shouldn’t have raced etc. etc….I rest my case”
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