Horses Are Dying Across the Pond This Week

by Stephanie Ernst · 2009-04-03 12:35:00 UTC
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Horse racing season is here. And Animal Aid has been documenting it in the UK. Because I'm behind in my Google Reader reading, I failed to realize until this afternoon that this past week was leading up to the Grand National and is therefore Animal Aid's Horse Racing Awareness Week. According to a post on this year's awareness week, "this is to highlight the cruelty of this race in particular, as well as the more widespread exploitation of horses by the racing industry."

Regarding this particular event, Animal Aid explains,

The Grand National is the main race of a three-day meeting at Aintree that killed 30 horses between 1998 and 2008. It is a deliberately punishing and hazardous event: longer than any other (four and a half miles) and presenting 30 uniquely high and challenging obstacles. It features perilous drops, ditches and sharp turns. Forty horses usually take part. Only one-third are likely to finish.

Already, with the event not even finished yet, four horses have died. See "The 'Best' and the 'Worst' Killed at Aintree" and "Aintree 2009 Claims Its First Victim" for more.

Animal Aid's Race Horse Death Watch Web site is heartbreaking and infuriating. Explanation of the site:

Animal Aid's Race Horse Death Watch was launched during the 2007 Cheltenham Festival. Its purpose is to expose and record every on-course Thoroughbred fatality in Britain.

The horse racing authorities have resolutely failed to put horse death information into the public domain, preferring to dismiss equine fatalities as ‘accidental’ and ‘unexplained’. Even when several horses die at a single meeting, the term ‘statistical blip’ is often deployed.

Animal Aid has produced a series of revealing reports over the last seven years exposing the welfare problems associated with Thoroughbred breeding, racing, training and disposal of commercially ‘unproductive’ horses. Our research indicates that around 420 horses are raced to death every year. About 38 per cent die on racecourses, while the others are destroyed as a result of training injuries, or are killed because they are no longer commercially viable.

Stephanie Ernst wrote the original Animal Rights blog at Change.org until December 2009. She can now be found at Animal Rights & AntiOppression.
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