If they land in, on or drag their hind legs through a fence and lose their backend they can injury themselves just as easily as we sadly saw at Aintree but with that being said if water jumps were banned I wouldn’t complain about it.
As I said I do think if you are going to continue having water jumps they should only be in front of the stands where the crowd can actually see the spectacle of a horse jumping it but there are not a lot of jumps course that do actually have them in that position……so I don’t see the point having a water jump anywhere else.
I fear that the BHA would very much view them as simply being another part of the jumping test that a horse faces in a chase race…….it might sadly take a very high profile horse to lose its life in order to see a ban coming in.