The horse, lean, dark brown with a dab of pure white on its forehead, is led into a whitewashed breezeblock room. An aluminium ladder leans against one of the walls and what resembles a blue hose pipe is discarded in a corner. It’s all very functional with a sliding metal door adding to the industrial ambiance. Waiting inside is a man dressed in a white jump suit, red overcoat, and cap. In one hand is a rifle. The door is calmly closed and the horse, a healthy thoroughbred that has simply lost its form, is shot. This is the real world of horse racing.
The Big Lie
When I visited Ascot Racecourse, I found myself staring not at the course, with all its grassiness and pristine white railing, but at the terraces. There was a sense of pomp and ceremony about the place, and with a history dating back to the 1700s you can be excused for being a little in awe. Here – where I was standing – was tradition and nobleness bestowed by royalty. This is the top table in spectator sports requiring a formal dress code and its own etiquette. After all, this is the sport of kings. But the grandeur is deceptive.
June 24th 2023 was a hot day and temperatures hit a stifling 28C by noon. It was the last day of Royal Ascot, one of the most prestigious events of the British racing calendar. Canute, a three-year-old colt who had one once in five races, was kept waiting. He wasn’t due to run until 5.30pm. Shortly into his race Canute suffered a broken hind leg after clipping heels with another horse. He was subsequently killed on site. Canute was born to Quality Road and mare Alice Springs and should have lived for between twenty-five and thirty years. He was the thirtieth horse to die at Ascot Racecourse since 2007. Alarmingly, he was not the youngest – Sabre Tiger, aged two, died on 22nd July 2012.
I doubt Canute ever managed to look at the terraces, but he would have heard the boisterous shouting and piercing screams, and sensed the frenzied hysteria of a crowd apathetic towards his wellbeing. His final moments, despite being surrounded by tens of thousands of race goers, must have been his most lonely.
Stripped of its façade, its regal sham, and its fraudulent marketing I began to realise the primal and cruel nature of horse racing. It isn’t a sport at all, but a set of perverse rituals including classifying horses purely as chattel, forcing them to breed, and from a very young age coercing them to perform to the point of exhaustion through intimidation and brutality. Oh, and regularly killing them when they can’t yield a sufficient income.
The Race That Never Was
“Now days they hide the dead horses behind green screens, and then winch them up into horseboxes so the public can’t see the dead bodies.”
Dene Stansall is an infectious smile crowned by waves of thick white hair. He has been around horses and racing his whole life and is a walking history on the subject. But more than that, Dene has been both racegoer and anti-racing campaigner which gives him a rare and unique perspective on the subject. He speaks compelling truths delivered in a thoughtful manner.
Dene tells me how he grew up in a racing household, going to races and occasionally betting. He also shares how in his early thirties things began to change for him.
“When I realised horses were dying in front of me, I thought I need to start campaigning for them rather than betting on them.”
1993 is a year the horseracing fraternity would rather forget. Every April, Aintree Racecourse near Liverpool hosts three days of racing. The highlight is the Grand National, a four-mile, thirty jump steeplechase dating back to 1839. The race is part of popular British culture with many non-racegoers speculating on winners and placing bets.
Moments before the race was to begin fifteen animal rights campaigners invaded the course forcing the race to be delayed. After the protestors were eventually removed the race embarrassingly had two false starts and was eventually declared void. The affair brought unwanted attention to the careless and primitive inner workings of racing and inspired a generation of anti-racing campaigners.
The Grand National Meeting has killed sixty-three horses since 2000, including four in 2023.
Although not present at the 1993 action, Dene was an active anti-racing campaigner and vocal welfare advocate at the time. He has since become involved with Animal Aid, monitors and reports on horse racing abuses, is a regular speaker on horse welfare issues and has written a book, Bred to Death.
Dene explains some of the structural flaws with horseracing. Firstly, the industry is self-regulating and with so many fatalities in training and on racecourses self-policing clearly isn’t working. Secondly, the breeding of racehorses is unregulated. This results in an overzealous mating regime with some stallions covering (mating) 300 mares a year. This is unnatural and unhealthy. Thirdly, there is an insufficient commitment to the horses that make it to ‘retirement.’ The industry, which is valued at some £5 billion, provides a measly £1.4 million provision for aftercare. Data is scarce, some argue by design, on what happens to horses once they leave racing, and we have to reach back to a 2010 article in Horse & Hound magazine to gain any insight. The article claims 7,500 horses retired from racing in 2006; within two years forty-five percent were dead or unaccounted for.
Systemic Cruelty
At its core, horse racing is about subjugation, violence, and premature death – these attributes are hardwired into the system. It is by design.
The process begins with foals forcibly separated from their mothers and sold into servitude. Alone and frightened they are ‘broken,’ or made compliant and submissive, after which their initial training begins. By eighteen months, despite not having reached musculoskeletal maturity, the training intensifies. There is no recorded data on how many chronic injuries occur in training, but it is assumed there are around 200 training deaths each year. If a horse shows promise it could be racing by the age of two.
The horse’s every moment is controlled, often through intimidation and force: pushing, pulling, yanking, and yelling. In addition, racehorses are subjected to cruel devices such as nose and lip chains, tongue ties, eye blinders, mouth bits, which often make the horse feel like they’re suffocating, and whips, according to Horseracing Wrongs, a US based non- profit committed to ending all animal exploitation. I struggle to imagine any of these contraptions being used on household pets, and yet with racehorses it is acceptable.
Horses are frequently kept locked-up and alone for long periods despite being herd animals. With their natural instincts and desires forcibly inhibited, emotional and mental suffering quickly develops, and behaviours such as cribbing, windsucking, bobbing, weaving, digging, kicking, and self-mutilating are regularly exhibited. Between sixty and ninety percent of active racehorses suffer from chronic ulcers attributed to stress.
In 2020, US equine veterinarian Dr. Kraig Kulikowski spoke of the trauma inflicted on young racehorses:
“These horses are immature juveniles. A two-year-old horse is equivalent to a six-year-old human, a three-year-old horse is equivalent to a nine-year-old human. Yet some of the biggest races regularly see three-year-olds participating. They still have their baby teeth, their bones are not mature, their brains are not mature. These juveniles are herded out to the racetrack, usually for less than thirty minutes of exercise a day. Most of the juveniles never see pasture or a moment of playtime once they start their career.”
It is estimated approximately 200 horses die at British racecourses a year, equivalent to one every couple of days. Between January and June of this year, 112 horses had already been killed; four died at Newton Abbot on a single day.
In the US the number of annual deaths is ten times higher: 2,000 a year, or the equivalent of about six horses a day.
The deaths are painful: bleeding out from the lungs, blunt-force trauma, broken necks, severed spines, ruptured ligaments, and shattered legs.
In February 2021, a photograph emerged on social media of leading trainer Gordon Elliott sitting on a dead horse. The horse, Morgan, died of a heart attack during training. While many were repulsed by this single image, campaigners are more worried by the countless abuses that go unphotographed and unreported.
The Magnifying Glass and the Mirror
“Horse racing is incredibly visible, the second-most popular spectator sport in the UK, and it has been falsely normalised. Most people don’t see it [horseracing] as an inherently bad thing.”
Ben Newman is a rarity, one of a few humans to have run in the Epsom Derby. He never finished, and was instead tackled by police, who hauled him into custody. Ben is a member of Animal Rising, a non-violent campaign and action group at the forefront of rehabilitating our societal relationships with animals and nature. Their mission is admirable, their day-to-day work hugely necessary.
During 2023, Animal Rising carried out six actions to bring much needed awareness to the cruelties of horseracing. One action was carried out on June 3rd during the Epsom premier Classic, a race that is open only to three-year-old horses and proudly boasts of the “undulating terrain on the Epsom Downs; including a sharp downhill run and then a stiff uphill climb in the home straight.” Dr. Kulikowski’s appraisal of three-year-old horses is worth repeating at this point: They still have their baby teeth, their bones are not mature.”
The action involved Ben jumping over the railing and running onto the track. It can be seen here.
https://x.com/iamjackmack/status/1664975768496099330
Ben was held in remand at Wandsworth prison, received a sixteen-week sentence suspended for two years and was fined £1,300. A total of thirty-one Animal Rising activists were arrested that day, including twelve at Epsom racetrack.
I ask Ben how he frames his Epsom experience.
“Did our actions help move the needle? Yes. Will it take loads more work? Yes.”
One additional aspect of Ben’s sentencing, and perhaps the most telling, was an injunction barring him from the Jockey Club’s fifteen racecourses. Ben’s mere presence at race meetings worried the racing establishment sufficiently enough to exclude him. If there was nothing to hide, why was such an action necessary?
Horseracing’s social licence is unravelling. Attendance is on a slow decline and all-important betting receipts, which subsidise racing through a levy scheme, are gradually shrinking. The industry has responded by attempting to distract from the horrors of racing by introducing corporate race days and gourmet eateries, staging music events with comeback acts such as Rick Astley. Newbury Racecourse has invested in a hotel and even a creche, and yet at the heart of all these attempts to manipulate and deceive is the undeniable truth – horseracing is a miserable, degrading, and deadly affair for horses.
Dene Stansall is applying a magnifying glass to the racing industry’s lethal flaws. He is bringing into focus all that is corrupt and wrong with a system that allows a few to exploit the many, and where at the bottom of the pyramid, in the darkest subterranean crevasses, horses are banished to live short and painful lives.
Ben Newman is holding up a mirror to society, challenging us to examine our dysfunctional relationship with horses, and asking when will we repair it, when will we change?
©2024 Sul Nowroz – Real Media staff writer
