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Agreed ID. Some mealy-mouthed responses from those in racing, easily translated as ‘mind your own business, we are racing folk’.
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Awful viewing. On top of everything else, who knew horses were put down by rifle in this day and age. Is that even legal?
I was expecting it to be sensationalist – and the guy from Animal Aid to be a downright lunatic – and unfortunately for racing IMO neither seemed to be the case.
Was it 4,000 horses a year who leave racing to be slaughtered, they calmly claimed?
If so, that can’t be left unanswered.
The reality, as we know, is owning a racehorse is expensive enough as it is without signing up to guaranteeing and funding lifelong aftercare too, and that’s even if the horse is in a physical condition to have any quality of life.
But IMO there needs to be a way of explaining the economic and veterinary realities to the wider public.
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It's the "Millwall FC" of Point broadcasts: "No One Likes Us - We Don't Care"Agreed ID – and Louise, I didn’t know about the rifle shots. I had wrongly assumed that was from a bygone era. It must be legal I assume, but I didn’t know. Better to send Anton Chigurgh with his Cattle Gun. Horrible.
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I saw a few disturbing videos on Youtube a few years ago. One was from Poland the other from China and they were even using a huge hammer and trying to hit the right spot.
But there are other videos on Youtube as well, very recent ones. One of them shows you the killing of Sweet Adare at Newton Abbot in April 2021. The horse has an injury to his hind leg as he keeps it moving it, but it’s not swinging at all. It gets his lethal injection, from the vet with no one else attending him in the last moments of his life and it falls down. Now, that’s not how you treat a King and you don’t send them to abattoirs either.
What is also very disturbing about this video is that horses that have finished the race are led past the erected screens, as if nothing happened. Don’t tell me horses are that stupid and don’t know that one of their own has lost his life a few feet away from them. First time it happens at exactly 0:57 secs, when a horse that has finished the race witnesses the fall of Sweet Adare after the lethal injection. Just watch it and then tell me that I’m wrong…. Sadly, this kind of treatment happens much too often and no one can tell me they didn’t know that.
Those guys from Devon against Horse Racing seem to be pretty aggressive with their filming and present at every meeting around Devon. You won’t need Panorama to tell you the truth about Horse Racing, you’ll get it on Youtube by the hour.
It seemed a very reasonable and balanced programme, which made a refreshing change in this day and age. I seriously wonder if it would have been made without the Gordon Elliott photo incident. Perhaps some good can come out of that sorry affair if this documentary actually leads to some positive change. The responses from the various authorities at the end did not exactly inspire though.
There is clearly far too much turning of blind eyes at all levels of the industry. And the Food Standards Agency has serious questions to answer too. Hopefully some more detail on the statistics quoted will emerge, and there needs to be much more visibility of these in future too.
Seeing poor old Vyta Du Roc and his trusting companions being led into the slaughter room made me sick to the bottom of my stomach. We owe it to the horses who gift us with this sport to keep the pressure up and help ensure things improve.
It is all sickening, but will blow over. The people making the real money in racing just don’t give a toss.
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Just like the Elliott photo, I doubt this documentary on its own will lead to a sizeable change in how racing is perceived. It’s more the constant drip feed that I think is gradually turning public opinion against racing, and will eventually reach a critical mass if the sport isn’t much more proactive about welfare. At some point it will start to hit those with the real money in the pocket, but it might all be too late by then.
I could not bring myself to watch it. It was enough to listen to the feature report on R4 PM (not known for its sensationalism), where the illegality of the methods of despatch were also addressed. Along with the drugs issue, this is beyond ‘not a good look’ for horse racing and its governing bodies. It goes to the very heart of the industry and its social licence. The ‘dark side’ to horse racing (and breeding) in the UK and Ireland has long been visible to those who want to look at and think about the numbers. An 8k foal crop; stallions covering 150-300 mares per year; the high turnover in the big yards; the non-existent breeding future for all those NH stores; the inability of rehabilitation/retraining charities to cope with anything other than tiny numbers. Then add to that the demand for horse meat in parts of Europe – think the investigative journalism of a few years ago, in which it was shown that horse meat is substituted for (the more expensive) beef in products destined for human consumption. It is obvious that the feel good, ‘where are they now’ stories shown to the masses on ITV apply only the lucky few, and are just that – feel good window dressing stories, deflecting attention from where it needs to be. Instead, over production, the high ‘wastage’ rate (whether that be the result of lack of ability, or injury) and insurance payouts for owners ensure that the majority (especially not good enough colts and geldings) are on a rapid conveyor belt to the slaughter house.
I think it can only damage casual racing attendances.
Yes, this stuff is on YouTube, but the wider public don’t go looking for it and tonight it was thrust under their noses on prime time TV.
It only takes one Karen on a planned girls night out to refuse to go racing (“because it looked cruel on the telly”) and they all go some place else for a quiet life.
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It's the "Millwall FC" of Point broadcasts: "No One Likes Us - We Don't Care"Those officially promoting the image of the sport will no doubt be hoping that the timing of the programme,coinciding with reaching the latest determining stage of the covid crisis, will have blunted it’s impact.
And they may also consider that as there are strong links between animal lib groups and the climate change brigade – many of them will right now be focussing on the flooding in Central Europe and may not be giving the programme the same priority as they normally would.
Still,it showed the sport in dreadful light and this is something which I hope that any attempt to put the lid back on fails.
The public might not go looking for negative information about racing, but Animal Aid and the like are very good at raising its profile and seeking out wide audiences. There are a lot of casual racegoers out there to be lost, as well as potential new racing fans. I don’t want to sound melodramatic, but if racing doesn’t take the issue of welfare seriously enough its future will be very bleak, and deservedly so.
If the Racing Post can be provided with information about the breeder and the exact day of birth of a racehorse, the same should happen with it’s exact date of death and location. Don’t tell me this isn’t possible in the year 2021.
After watching the Panorama programme, I’m lost for words. Before watching it I would say that most top class racehorses are well looked after but the selling class might be different. In the program one horse turns up at slaughterhouse five years after it’s reported death. It also has another chip identifying it, I suspect it’s real identity. Humans have a death certificate when they die, maybe the same should be done for racehorses. Anyway here’s a report about the subject from Sporting Life website.
BBC Panorama: Dark Side Of Horse Racing reaction
By Cornelius Lysaght
23:16 · MON July 19, 2021
Me and a couple of friends have enjoyed many happy days owning a racehorse named Craiganboy which has now been retired to live with his devoted groom who, with her family, is happy to take him on alongside another with racing days also behind them from the same training operation.There is no doubt that the 12-year-old is off to what will hopefully be a long, and unquestionably a much-loved, retirement but the whole process prompted inevitable thoughts about whether other horses that bow out go along the same kind of route as ‘big Craig’.
Panorama, with the support of a hardline animal rights group dedicated it must be said to the abolition of racing, has been considering the same topic, and came up with a film that sent a shudder up the spine about what could potentially happen; underlining the importance of vigilance in terms of post-racing care by the Irish and British racing authorities; and demonstrated again the power of ‘that photograph’ of trainer Gordon Elliott sitting on the dead Morgan.
The principal ‘scandal’ of The Dark Side of Horse Racing however was that a British abattoir licenced to euthanise horses, which has been involved in unfavourable headlines before, has been filmed secretly by Animal Aid allegedly flouting welfare rules with vets from the Government’s regulating Food Standards Agency (FSA) apparently standing by, plus there is a chance that horse meat is fraudulently entering the food chain – all that needs investigation.
The programme however concentrated on the racing side of it, though that said there were matters on which it correctly touched.
The British Horseracing Authority calculates that more than 6,000 horses leave permanent training at some point during a calendar year, mostly to head to activities from breeding, point-to-pointing and eventing to being a companion or a leisure horse like Craiganboy; this is mainly arranged between individuals, but the Retraining of Racehorses charity also plays a significant role.
It would, of course, be foolish to try to deny that none ever ends up in an abattoir, and indeed euthanasia regulations exist which say that such a path should only be taken to stop suffering, from injury, illness or so on, or in certain exceptional circumstances mainly relating to the simple possibility that some horses are unsuitable for rehoming through for example temperament.
The problem about this is that, certainly in Britain, exact numbers and details are incomplete, as was highlighted by the independent Horse Welfare Board, in its wide-ranging 2020 strategy-report, ‘A Life Well-Lived’, which called for “traceability across the lifetimes of horses bred for racing”, and emphasised the responsibilities of all in the sport, including in relation to funding.
Progress to improve matters was held up by the pandemic but is said to be underway again; with horse welfare, and the wider public’s perception of it, the single most important issue as regards the future of racing that now needs to be accelerated as Covid restrictions are lifted.
The prospect that any racehorse which gave its all on the track could conceivably be allowed to vanish to who-knows-where is a Grade One stomach-churner.
Panorama has spent plenty of time examining racing over the last 20 years, and the sport is always said to be braced for uncomfortable viewing when the investigators come calling. In pre-Authority days, I recall claims being made about the quality of governance by the then regulator The Jockey Club,and allegations about corruption involving jockeys and betting exchanges also got an airing on one of the programme’s always prime-time slots.
20 years on, welfare is bigger than ever, and the fact that three of the horses seen trudging through the abattoir had been trained by Elliott, who is currently serving a ban as a result of a welfare-related issue, must have had producers salivating – though he insists all was perfectly above board with the trio.
That photograph is going nowhere I suspect except to haunt him and us.
You've got to accentuate the positive.
Eliminate the negative.
Latch on to the affirmative.
Don't mess with mister in between.Cornelius Lysaght needs to grow up. Its not all about that awful photo. What a pathetic arse-covering piece. Predictable.
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A generous interpretation of that article is that he is in complete denial about the scale of the issue. Good for him for making sure Craiganboy is well cared for though.
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