Last week I posted on social media a screenshot of a story from Sky News covering the deaths of two horses at the Cheltenham Festival. To be honest I could have picked over 30 different stories covering this. My position as President of the UK National Equine Welfare Council, President of the Sporthorse Welfare Foundation and recipient of a BHS Welfare Award puts me in a difficult position. If I comment, then I am accused of attacking racing and ignoring the welfare issues in other areas of the equestrian world. If I don’t, then I am accused of colluding with the industry. My view is that we need to continue to have uncomfortable discussions around the welfare of horses in televised and high-profile events. And that doesn’t mean that hyperflexion, tight nosebands, rapping, obesity, and other forms of poor welfare or abuse are any less important. ALL horse sport is increasingly under scrutiny. If we dismiss the critics as “ill-informed nutters” or we simply choose to ignore criticism, then we will hasten the demise of horse sport – and I include racing under that.
In my short comment, I mentioned two things. Firstly, there are over 40 petitions calling for a ban on horseracing. This is a FACT. You can go check it out on Change.org. Almost 1,000,000 people have signed petitions related to banning horseracing worldwide. I also mentioned that if these petitions were 1 instead of 40, then IN MY OPINION, racing could be in trouble, as we have seen with bans on jump racing in Australia in recent years. Secondly, I made the statement, “Whatever measures have been put in place to improve horse safety, they don’t appear to be making any significant difference.”. Many people defending racing took exception to this and complained I had no evidence. Actually, I did have the evidence, having already done the analysis. However, I chose not to release this with the article in order to avoid being accused of “attacking racing”. However, after careful consideration and after multiple challenges, mostly respectful, and of course, as expected for any professional posting on social media, a number were offensive and defamatory. C’est la vie. Anyway, be carefull what you wish for.
So, this is what I didn’t share last week. Prior to posting about the deaths at Cheltenham Festival last week, I went to the attheraces.com site and searched their archives to record the number of starters per race and the maximum number of starters per race since 2004 to 2023 (I then added 2024 retrospectively at the end of the Festival). I also used a variety of other sites to confirm how many horses died during races in that period. As you can see, reporting numbers of deaths alone is not helpful in determining risk. We really need to know the number of deaths per starter. If there are 500 starters and 1 death then the risk is 1 per 500; If there were 500 starters and 2 deaths then it’s 1 death per 250 starters. But if there are only 250 starters and 1 death then although the total number of deaths is less, the risk is the same. So if the number of starters in total for each year has decreased and the number of deaths has stayed the same, then the risk has increased.
So what we can see is that there has been a trend for a small reduction in the average number of starters per race and maximum number of starters in a single race each year from 2004 to 2024.
We can also see that the total number of starters by year has been decreased in the past 4 years. And we can also see that the number of deaths per year is quite variable.
Finally, if we look at deaths per number of starters each year (i.e. the total number of deaths over the whole Festival and the total number of runners), then I’m not sure we can argue that there has been significant improvement. In this figure low numbers are bad and high numbers are better. You can use various statistics to look at this further. For example, The median death risk from 2004-2013 was 1 death per 196 starters, and from 2014-2024 was 1 death per 166 starters – i.e. slightly worse. And definitely not better.
So these are facts. You can argue with how they have been presented. I believe they have been presented honestly. But these support my assertion that “Whatever measures have been put in place to improve horse safety, [at the Cheltenham Festival] they don’t appear to be making any significant difference.”
