- This topic has 179 replies, 29 voices, and was last updated 6 years, 8 months ago by
.
- Posts
tbh LS, I don’t know what you said so can’t comment about that and don’t know what’s happened in the past. But although David makes a few decisions I don’t agree with, seems pretty fair and this site is better policed than most.
You just have to be a little more accomodating. In my opinion – and it is only my opinion
– we should keep the writing to the sport of horse racing and not personal stuff. Strong words can be ok. Although I try not to be quite as provocative these days; do think it’s (on only these big issues threads where strong opinions are expected) ok to describe someone’s opinion on a subject as “ridiculous”, but not an individual as ridiculous.Please don’t provoke, as the forum is better with people of your racing knowledge, LS.
Value Is EverythingIn football, tackles from behind were outlawed because the tackling player could only get to the ball by going through the opposing player; that is, inevitably hitting his legs, ankles and tendons first. The tackling player saying that he was only going for the ball is true, but it was deemed to be unacceptable because of the potential damage to the tackled player. Most such tackles just hurt the tackled player a small or medium amount (because the momentum of both players is going in the same direction, or one is standing still and there is little or no “closing” force), but some were more damaging depending on the exact angle of momentum at contact.
Even before the tackle from behind was banned, and certainly now that it is banned, most tackles that severely injure players are not from behind. The vast majority arise by accident: maybe like – Player A goes to tackle Player B who has the ball, Player A kicks the ball with his right foot, Player A’s left leg is bent at the knee and is parallel with the ground and three inches above the turf when Player A’s momentum pushes his shin into Player B’s ankle. Unfortunately Player B’s foot is “planted” because he was about to kick the ball. The shin into the ankle dislocates it and breaks two small bones, or maybe tears a ligament. Medium or serious injury results in Player B missing part of the season. Such ordinary tackles could end someone’s career.
So, why has the banning of tackles from behind not lead, as the next step, to the banning of all tackles in the game of football? Even though the tackles from the front or side have greater potential to be more damaging because of the angle of momentum at contact, and the speed with which the players’ bodies are moving, those tackles have not been banned. And there are far more of those tackles. The decision is just not rational, is it? Behavoural pyschologists might say that the tackle from behind was banned, not because of the objective facts about injury, but the perception that it is not “sporting” and therefore wrong because the the tackled player cannot see the tackler and is taken by surprise. It is in our culture and upbringing to believe that hitting someone from behind by surprise is a wrong thing to do. We humans love to take a decision using feelings and perception, and post-rationalize it after the decision has been taken. The people who took that decision did not know that their brain was shouting “not sporting”, because the brain does lots of things that it does not tell our conciousness.
Many members of the public may want the whip to be banned because they see it as a human being hitting a dumb animal, and it comes naturally to their brain that it equates to kicking a cat or bullying a weaker kid, and is therefore wrong. They do not calculate that, it is an immediate, instinctive reaction; it uses a different part of the brain from the assessment of objective reality. However, the public still see racing, even over jumps, as a legitimate sport because they assess it rationally as a whole sport. It does not immediately come to the instinctive part of their brain as wrong.
So, you are having a picnic sitting under a tree on a Summer’s day, and you feel a tickle on your bald head. Within a tenth of a second you have swept your hand across your head, and there lies on your picnic blanket a beautiful, but dead, Red Admiral butterfly. On Monday you return to the vast Pick Your Own and Farm Shop where you work. The boss tells you that it’s butterfly time, so before they have time to deface some of the brassicas, you should get ten staff members and go out into the fields and kill as many as you can. You find youself asking your boss if it would not be better to put nets round 99.9% of the crop and and leave the other 0.1% to the butterflies.
People are really strange creatures because their brain lies to their consciousness all the time. It must scare behavioural pyschologists when they know enough to understand that they really are part of the weirdest animal species on Earth. People do believe that hitting animals with what looks like a stick is plain wrong, while asking horses to jump fences is part of an OK sport.
Like tackles in football, in the right context, the more dangerous can be embraced while the less dangerous is banned. It’s called human behaviour.
The tackle from behind is more of a rule change than a ban.
If a team is attacking and look like scoring a player from the opposition team is likely to use the tackle from behind to break up the play and take a yellow card for the team. Likewise the whip rule will be broken to take advantage of the weak rules in order to gain a success for the team (connections)If things are banned because of human brain is wrong and poor human behaviour dictates then the wrong people are in charge and pandering to them is worse.
Gaelic Warrior Gold Cup Winner 2026
Hi Nathan. As someone once said “The only thing wrong with the world is Other People.” I find that too: people just will not do what I want them to do. It’s not as if they need a mind of their own, is it? There are plenty of other minds out there that have slaved over the analysis and research, and some people will just ignore it. When I think that something is right, I cannot understand how other people think it is wrong. It must be their brain.
Some great posts there MV
We certainly are a strange and unique race.Talking of horses welfare away from racing and the whip..
I’ve never heard of the game of Polo being brought to account, or anyone trying to ban it, where it’s been known for horses to lose an eye being hit by the ball and many must sustain a few hefty wacks with the Mallet being swung about freely. Would anyone even think to make it compulsory for polo horses/ponies to wear eye shields and body protection,
Doubt that will happen any time soon with it being the favoured Sport of Princes.
Things turn out best for those who make the best of how things turn out...We’re still missing the point in this thread though. If by banning the whip kills racing as we know it, it won’t happen. I certainly for one, in betting terms, will not be interested by races that have different results any time you run them which is potentially what will happen with no whip. So if that mindset is replicated enough times across the industry it will kill interest/kill bookmakers and kill advertising.
There is no way in my mind that is happening anytime soon. Maybe it will happen in 20 years, but not soon.
People have latched onto what Charlie Fellows said and manipulated it somewhat. The point of most of what he was saying was about overuse of the whip which I 100% agree with. I looked back at the Thunder Snow ride again by Christophe Soumillion. It was absolutely disgusting and I also repeat what I said about Hayley Turner arrogantly talking about basically cheating because she didn’t give a **** about the ban she was going to get. This is very wrong and needs to be addressed and corrected and new rules put in place, but people have made it into a big story about banning the whip altogether.
I am convinced, if we made a rule about the use of the whip only being allowed to be used say 3 times max, which is all it would take to make sure horses get the reminders they need (is it not?) and then educated people that have no idea about the sport(something else Charlie Fellows admitted in his story that his friends who he was using to make the point have no interest in the sport), then everybody would stop talking about it.
Nobody is talking about it apart from those inside of the sport, and the odd person who feels they can gain traction from documenting about it.
This ‘outside pressure’ isn’t prevalent to any decent extent really is it? otherwise we’d see people campaigning outside courses and such.Frenchy, why reduce the number to 3 if the whip doesn’t hurt the horse? The BHA being over-defensive by putting a random number on the whip is what continues to bring up this non-issue time after time.
As for NH going after the whip if the whip somehow did get abolished – i can 100% see that being the follow on.
My girlfriend will never go to a jumps meeting again after seeing several horses fall in front of her at Leopardstown the other year, but she’s happy to go to York next month because it’s flat racing – reducing the chances of her seeing a horse get injured tenfold.
Marginal Value, I’m not sure your analogies are much use.
Similarly to the whip I saw no public outcry for the tackle from behind to be outlawed but felt it was perfectly reasonable to do so. Ball first, man second (within reason). Plenty of evidence heading a football has had a detrimental effect on players wellbeing and health and why wouldn’t it? But don’t expect it to be outlawed anytime soon.
Where did you get the information and analysis contained in your paragraph beginning “Many members of the public”?
Most of the troubles currently with the whip have been self inficted by horse racing itself, particularly the BHA.
First we had that clown Jamie Stier a few years putting a number of whip strikes to be used in the final furlong to where we are today, with still ludicrously, a number put on whip use. A number is not needed to see if there has been misuse of the whip.
Only the other day the previous BHA chief Paul Bittar said that he largely agreed with Mark Johnston’s article on the whip and added “I also think the trend towards trying to placate those against the sport is a surprising one and unlikely to be successful anyway”.
Pity he’s still not in charge instead of the hopeless Nick Rust, the sooner he goes the better.I wonder why cormack15 highlighted one line of Gingertipster’s post as being opinion not fact and not most of steeplechasing’s post on July 17 at 20.06?
All Charlie Fellowes was bothered about was that the historic win was overshadowed by the news of the ban on the national news, making our sport look bad in his opinion.
Who was to blame for that? The BHA is the answer.
Frenchy, why reduce the number to 3 if the whip doesn’t hurt the horse? The BHA being over-defensive by putting a random number on the whip is what continues to bring up this non-issue time after time.
Well two things there, 1) it’s not 100% established that it doesn’t hurt the horse is it? If it’s a slap on the thigh type impact then if someone did that to me it might make me run a bit faster but if someone did it 15 times in fairly quick succession then it would really annoy me 2) I also think it’s completely unneccessary to hit a horse constantly and probably most importantly it looks horrendous when it’s done ala Christophe soumillion. As someone that works in marketing, this can be a Marketing/PR disaster.
I am an animal lover and a sports lover so can have a pretty considered view on this and I hate seeing a horse thrashed in the last furlong but completely understand why banning it is ridiculous.
If you got a slap on the thigh 15 times it would leave a mark? The whip is marking 1 out of thousands so it can’t hurt the horse, especially when used in the correct place on the horse. It’s foam/plastic by used by a 10 stone jockey on a half tonne animal who is running with high adrenaline etc.
Constantly hitting the horse, like Soumillon, is wrong. But any person with a pair of eyes could see that his actions were wrong. Doesn’t mean we need to reduce the random number even further?
Dickie went over the number on Native River in last years GC and he wasn’t constantly hitting the horse? It was a perfect ride which would’ve been acknowledged as such had this random number not been enforced.
Hi Yeats. Paragraph beginning: “Many members of the public…”
Four bits used together about the data, one from The Public Library Of Science; one from the BHA, one statement from a Racecourse Manager, one from a YouGov Survey.
From Public Library Of Science: by University of Sydney, McGreevy et al
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0192843#sec008
which included:
“When respondents were asked whether they thought horses should be hit with a whip in the normal course of a race, 1,149 respondents answered “No” (74.95%), and 384 answered “Yes” (25.05%).”
From BHA Report 2011 Para5.8 When asked for their instinctive views on the use of the whip in Racing, 57% of all respondents said they strongly or somewhat agreed it should be banned completely, with women significantly more likely than men to say this (68% vs 45%).
From 2014: “Kevin Ackerman, general manager of Towcester Racecourse, located in
Northamptonshire, said that even though they had the potential of
attracting approximately five hundred thousand spectators, they only
average approximate seven thousand, and they therefore conducted the
survey revealing that most view whipping as cruel and will therefore not
support the sport.”A 2014 YouGov poll conducted in the UK on behalf of Animal Aid found that 70 per cent of all respondents oppose the use of the whip.
In 2011 the BHA stated in their report on the use of the whip in racing:
Para 3.23 In conclusion, there is little scientific information available to definitively understand the behavioural effects or the welfare assessment of whip use in Racing.As far as I am aware, the BHA has not on its own, or together with other racing authorities, requested or funded any research to gather any further scientific information to remedy the situation of not knowing if the whip effects performance or welfare.
If you are interested in how people make decisions or arrive at opinions, I can recommend the book Thinking Fast And Slow by Nobel Prize Winner Daniel Kahneman. Although it is about the science of the how and why of instinctive decisions (fast) and calculating decisions (slow), it is written in a very user-friendly way.
A 2014 YouGov poll conducted in the UK on behalf of Animal Aid found that 70 per cent of all respondents oppose the use of the whip.
“on behalf of Animal Aid”.
“of all respondents”.LOL
Could it be that certain types of people were targeted for this poll? eg If targeting people in cities, and/or predominently women – you’d get a false result.
Usually when people don’t care either way or even if they’re not particularly interested in the subject they don’t “respond” / are not “respondents”. So to imply 70% of all people oppose the whip is fundamentally wrong.
Animal Aid wants to see the end of racing and the end of any human interference with animals. No horses, no dogs, no cats etc etc.
Value Is EverythingAgain, what does “respondents” mean?
Australian whip rules are -as I understand them – not as strong as ours.
Australian jockey’s style is different to ours – appearing at least – more aggressive/harder hit and hitting one after the other.Australia has already banned what we would understand as National Hunt Racing.
Could it be Towcester is making excuses for people not going to their racecourse? How many supposedly not going racing because of the soft, safe whip… would actually go to see horses jump their hard, injury making, killer fences if the whip were banned?
Value Is EverythingThe tackle from behind:
Banned because although the tackler may have been taking ball before man, rules of intent were rightly changing throughout football. Tackles seen in a different light… We rightly no longer have the violence of Norman Hunter, Ron Harris and Vinnie Jones… nothing to do with “perception”.
Of course the tackle from the side or front can be dangerous even if done correctly. However, real point of tackling is to take the ball fairly and when coming from front or side the ball is in clear or clearish view. No need to take the man too. Not that there were no changes for safety and fairness. High and two footed tackles outlawed (from anywhere).
On most occasions the whole idea of tackling from behind was to take the man too… ie Intent to bring the man down is against the general rules of intent – wherever the tackle comes from. Should they have kept the tackle from behind just for the 1 in 10 that does not also have an intent of taking the man too? No.
F… “perception”! Things ARE done for safety and fairness.
Made perfect sense to ban the tackle from behind because it was not fair and could be dangerous.
Banning the soft, safe whip would not be fair and does not make any sense.Value Is EverythingFine posts on this thread by Marginal Value.
Ginger, on your killer fences V the whip point, fences need to be jumped. That’s part of the rules of NH racing. Horses do not need to be hit. There’s no rule to say they must be. Also, there’s a very strong argument that horses enjoy jumping obstacles.
As to banning the whip, you don’t have to cite welfare grounds. The BHA could do their own YouGov survey (I strongly suspect it would come out with about the same result as the Animal Aid one). The survey would be based on perception. The BHA could then announce that the whip would in future be used only for safety. This would be based not on welfare grounds but on the strength of public perception. They could reinforce that they had no concerns on welfare grounds, thus avoiding the ‘what about horses falling and dying’ comeback and other potentially difficult questions.
I hope that answers your question from earlier (I’ve been away for a few days). Now, would you answer mine? What price the whip still being used for ‘encouragement’ on January 1st 2025?
Point is Kev, if hitting the horse makes it run faster then it’s obviously feeling it, so there is a fair debate to be had. I don’t recall the ride you mention but I would question the need to hit a horse 7 times in any case. If the whip is used as “a reminder” then a couple of go’s at it should be enough. Currently the rules state you can hit a horse 7 times in a race I think right? So you can hit the horse 7 times in the final furlong and be within the rules. I think there’s a fair debate to be had there. If you need to hit a horse 7 times in the last furlong I would suggest it’s done it’s running. The trouble is having a debate about reducing whip use opens up the stupid debate about banning it.
Maybe 3 is too short I don’t really know. Maybe they could issue guidelines to say 3-5 times, but the rule stays at 7, meaning if you go over 7 you have no excuses whatsoever and you’ll get a lengthy ban for it. Currently the rule says 7s absolutely fine but 8s completely wrong which is a bit stupid also.
I can feel a feather tickling my ankle, it might make me pick my feet up, but that doesn’t mean I’m in pain. Horses are flight animals so sometimes just waving the thing will get the desired reaction from them. I wouldn’t ban it altogether but if there are rules there should be a meaningful punishment for breaking them otherwise what’s the point.
– we should keep the writing to the sport of horse racing and not personal stuff. Strong words can be ok. Although I try not to be quite as provocative these days; do think it’s (on only these big issues threads where strong opinions are expected) ok to describe someone’s opinion on a subject as “ridiculous”, but not an individual as ridiculous.
- You must be logged in to reply to this topic.