My law firm usually celebrates the Melbourne Cup the Sydney way: with fascinators, champers, a TAB punt, and three minutes of screaming at the TV.
Then we saw the revelations on ABC’s 7.30 about what the horse racing industry quaintly calls “wastage”, or what I’d call “the calculated annual slaughter of thousands of healthy horses”.
Collectively, we decided that we were done.
We tweeted our decision to our 4000-or-so followers. Knowing what we now knew, we were simply choosing to no longer celebrate or support the racing industry.
Each year we also tweet that we won’t be celebrating Australia Day on January 26. Nobody much cares. But let casually slip that you’re skipping a horse race, and my goodness…
Our tweet has been retweeted and liked more than 5000 times, and we’ve been interviewed by Virginia Trioli and the chief racing writer at The Age.
We have also copped a mother lode of abuse. I won’t go into it, hilarious as it is, but I am spellbound by the passion we have unleashed.
The whole thing is just so Australian. As a nation we famously don’t give a shit about much, but there are a lot of people here who clearly feel a desperate and visceral insistence that everyone (I mean everyone) must honour The Cup.
But let’s consider the actual issue; what we find is a mathematical equation followed by an ethical one.
The maths is brutally simple: as exposed by 7.30, the Australian racehorse breeding industry produces around 13,000 thoroughbred foals each year. These horses have an average racing life of two or three years, but should live until 25-30. Consequently, about 8500 horses are unceremoniously “retired” from racing each year.
I didn’t know this until the 7.30 report aired. The racing industry, however, has known it all along.
This brings us to the ethical question: are we OK with an industry which fulfills its purpose — running horse races for our entertainment — on the production of thousands of horses that cannot realistically be offered the opportunity to live the full length of their natural lifespan?
This is qualitatively no different from the greyhound racing industry, which involves the deaths of some 18,000 dogs a year. There’s no getting around it. And all the money that the industry is now promising to throw at “humane treatment” of retired racehorses can’t reconcile the equation.
Sure, as base-level morality, the industry owes the horses a less horrible death than 7.30 showed they’ve been getting, but it’s still death.
Is this OK? It’s not OK by me.
After the tweet, I was accused of having selective ethics — and that’s spot on. All ethics are selective; they’re not innate. We can all make a decision on this, as we can on any other issue.
Obviously the critical mass of people remain overwhelmingly on board with racing and betting on racing — particularly on the iconic Melbourne Cup. Our tweet tapped into a deep well of national identity.
Can the maths change that? What about the death of War Ends, one of the hundreds of thoroughbreds tortured and killed at a Queensland abattoir in less than a month, secretly filmed for 7.30? War Ends won $400,000 in prize money for his owners, before his life was ended in conditions that should shame us all.
There’s nothing evil about racing, per se. It could be done in a way that doesn’t hurt horses beyond the inherent physical risk of the sport itself. That would mean fewer horses and slower races but, if the fun is really in watching and betting, it would lose no popularity.
How will we, as a nation, navigate our way to a new landing point on the sport of kings? The status quo is untenable and we know it.
Are you celebrating the Melbourne Cup this year? If not, what could get you back on board? Send your comments to boss@crikey.com.au. Please include your full name for publication.
I have completely abjured horseracing since reading Anne Manne’s October 2010 Monthly essay on the subject. It is still up on the Monthly site. Cruelty is systemic at all stages of the industry, not just when the horses retire. I am not a vegetarian, I abhor the societal misery of all forms of gambling, but reserve a special loathing for the exploitation of animals in the cause of it. Ban it all for ever.
So the moral outrage is that healthy horses are killed after their useful function has been fulfilled. The implicit argument is that it is the killing of animals that would otherwise live healthy lives that is particularly abhorrent.
But millions of cattle and pigs are killed annually after being bred to do nothing but die. That is their sole purpose.
Surely that is equally, or more, abhorrent, to create a creature like that.
And surely it is morally lax to let that latter feature – their being bred-for-death – disguise their fate from you, and to permit you to put more moral weight on the killing of horses – who happened to have an identity conferred on them in a human cultural practice, ie racing – than on undifferentiated ‘others’.
Isnt this simply, within the world of non-human animals, a form of speciesism, the very system that makes horse racing acceptable? Isnt it also anthropomorphism?
Like I said, all ethics are selective. My sole point, for the purposes of my piece, is that I’m not ok with the practice of killing thousands of horses for the purpose of supplying an industry that exists for sport and gambling. I am less certain that the sport of horse racing itself is unjustifiable due to the deaths/injuries to horses it causes, but that’s equally open to argument. As to whether it’s alright to kill millions of animals for food, again totally up for debate. Nothing I wrote suggests that my concern is based on a special quality granted to horses over any other species. I also didn’t use the word “moral”, which is not the same as “ethical”.
I don’t eat meat. I never have. I was raised vegetarian. So this whole sorry mess should have been clear to me or at least questionable. However, I had the delusional view that horses in horse racing were given the best possible care and quality of life. They were “Australian Stars” after all. It was complete ignorance on my behalf. I should have asked the now obvious questions. I didn’t. It took being confronted with indisputable footage.
Ethics/morals are selective, but theyre not purely subjective. They have internal coherence or the lack of such. The ‘for sport’/ ‘for meat’ distinction doesnt seem persuasive, if the fulcrum of the ethical decision is the suffering of the animal, and the termination of its healthy life. Same terror, same torturous killing. And at a volume that do vastly exceeds racehorse killing, as to make it a drop in a bucket of blood. Doesnt yr choice drift into the realm of the aesthetic, rather than ethical?
Yes, anthropomorphism is exactly the term which applies in the racing industry. But it’s not a term to flash around in the Bird cage, mainly because few people in there would understand its meaning.
Surely the people who enjoy “punting” have to be less well educated than the non punting people. After all, a field of 10-20 runners whose jockeys were dressed in plain riding gear, would be a pretty boring event. This is the reason racing Australia employs trumpeters to announce a race, other people to tout the qualifications of the runners and most importent of all, so called fashionisters taking shots of the socially aware. Anything to hide the true reason why thousands of ex-racehorses are treated like shit in abattoirs.
Too many horses are bred. Something needs to be done about these excess numbers of horses. Something really has to be done about dodgy trainers who torture horses with mechanical devices, only for the poor bloody animal to get a repeat dose in the abattoirs.
There is this ghastly belief that Australians love the underdog, that we give the underdog a fair go, that we’re a bunch of well meaning twats. The whole scenario is humbug. The great Aussie wheat scandal showed us exactly what kind of people we really are.
Like you GR I can’t see the difference between raising race horses and lamb chops. However it’s obvious there are serious deficiencies around that final journey into the abattoir. In terms of overall racehorse wellbeing though jumps racing is the big issue.
I’m pretty sure all this euphemistic wastage has been well exposed before. Most gambling is about exploiting the mathematically illiterate. Big time gamblers are quite a different story. They gamble with what they can afford to lose safe in the knowledge they’ll win a good bit back sooner or later whilst suitably impressing enough of the right people along the way.
Poor people gamble mostly on pokies now which also has by far the worst payout ratio.
As someone who arrived in Australia not having any idea what was going on much of the time – the Melbourne Cup was like an Australian cultural event that I could so easily participate in. Every year I would enthusiastically be a part of it all. I loved it because I didn’t need to know anything – no one knew anything – they all went horse racing delirious once a year. And it turns out the very thing that drew me in was the issue that would end it for me. Now I do know. I don’t want anything to do with it any more & I won’t put my money near horse racing again.
Do you eat meat, Michael Bradley?
Good question. Aren’t there two separate issues:
• the slaughter of horses for food
• disposal of horses no longer kept for racing, breeding, or – broadly – as pets using processes and methods that are below the standards set and enforced for the slaughter of other animals?
Am I celebrating the Melbourne Cup this year? Fuck, no! It’s bad enough that the abominations of the greyhound breeders have been allowed to continue, thanks to money and the 2GB headkickers , but what I saw on the ABC report on the fate of racehorses went beyond slaughter and ingratitude; it was nasty, and it was cruel.