Welfare and the Whip

Let’s make this clear. The reason racing is in the dock at this moment in time is that Aintree put a tarpaulin over Ornais clearly showing his deceased frame, the BBC happened to have a camera angle showing two dead horses and a director who chose to repeatedly show the pictures. Broadcasters have claimed that they’ve received more messages complaining about the use of the whip than dead horses but the welfare issue stirred up by the national press is about horses being ‘raced to death’. When I went out on the evening of the Grand National a female friend asked me if I watched the race but said he and her Dad had been saddened and shocked to see that horses had died. My response was that if I had my way the most-watched race in Britain would be the Cheltenham Gold Cup and didn’t really like seeing the most dangerous race being the face of the sport. But there’s nothing we can do about it. I declined to mention that horses had died in most previous Grand Nationals but that she’d failed to notice. I’ll blog in future on other welfare issues including the ground (which I consider vital for not just the obvious reasons), fences, hurdles and the like. Now the hot topic is the whip due to an announcement by Towcester Racecourse that they want to ban it from October.  The announcement was made in such a way which exposed racing’s overstretched, under-resourced and uncoordinated communications operation. I know it was Good Friday but this tweet from the BHA Head of Comms says it all really.

My stance is like most in racing. Beating horses sounds completely wrong yet the whip isn’t cruel anymore in terms of the damage it does by smacking. It is padded enough, and horses are strong enough, for it not to do harm. The RSPCA agrees (let’s not mention what the letter ‘R’ stand for in their name or whether that has anything to do with their stance). Those who oppose the whip recognise this but say it is an issue of perception by the public.

However, I think the storm over Jason Maguire on Ballabriggs was never fully that he was hurting the horse with each hit but rather that he was trying to force a horse tired, dehydrated and with no energy left to go faster when if jockeys really had the interest of the horse at heart he would have stopped a fence before and jumped off rather than smack it to the line. I don’t want to sound overly pessimistic but imagine what state the sport would be in had Ballabriggs collapsed and died. The cause would be identified as what Maguire was trying to do in the first place (win a tough race in improper conditions) rather than how that was gone about (using the whip). The fact that racing does what it does was superbly defended by Alastair Down in the Racing Post and I can’t put it better.

In the next week I’m planning to post more on this issue:

When someone says: ‘People think it’s cruel so we should ban the whip to attract more people’ it’s tempting to reply: ‘Well sod them for being ignorant, we don’t want them anyway.’ I’ll try and offer opinion on both parts of this debate – whether it puts people off and whether we should be trying to attract these people anyway.

With some relevance to my latest post on globalisation, I will explore how practical it would be to ban the whip in Britain. I’m no horseman so cannot really give confident views on what races would be like without a whip or whether, as Dave Yates argues, the spectacle of horses, particularly on the flat, running their fastest and the best winning, would be lost; but I’ll consider it based on quotes from people who are. There’s a spectrum ranging from keeping the status quo to banning the whip entirely with some quite fanciful options in between. When I get time I’ll go over them.

Racing has welfare considerations at its core. Making the public believe this is essential to taking racing forward.

Happy Easter!