Apparently he is paralysed from his injuries sustained at Cheltenham. If a horse is injured in a race and can no longer race it is euthanased, presumably this applies to jockeys too? It's only fair. Well, almost fair given that jockeys make the decision to race whereas horses are forced to.
I dunno, maybe eat some grass, **** another horse, have a trot about the moors? You can't justify horses dying agonising deaths in the name of sport.
Well I could use the same logic to say that driving cars around is unjustifiable in the name of convenience, since a couple of thousand people die agonising deaths every year? There is a lot of prestige and indeed money involved in maintaining a race horse, therefore the yards tend to treat them really well - then there are a couple of charities set up to retrain and house them with families once they are past their racing days (if they are not lucky enough to go to stud farms). It has always seemed a bit strange to me that people focus their attention on horses which lead fairly civilized lives when there are hundreds of thousands of other relatively intelligent mammals being housed in factory farms.
Abusing animals for entertainment is wrong. I am against horse racing, bull fighting, fox hunting, hare coursing, lion taming and killer whales doing tricks in swimming pools. No Toby, I used to go hunt sabbing but got fed up having to get up at 5am on a Saturday morning.
Most horses enjoy racing, and those that don't don't race, as you can't get a large animal like a horse to do something it doesn't want to do. Race horses are treated like kings, they are fed the best food, and they get regular exercise. You have to treat a horse well, if you want to get the best out of them on the track. So racing isn't cruel, as race horses live a far better quality of life than most pet horses
I'm not a fan of bull fighting or fox hunting, and neither is most of the country hence why it's banned. You cannot though put horse racing in the same category as those 'sports'
We are each of us entitled to draw the line where we see fit. I'm a bit undecided on fishing as I used to do it all the time as a kid and probably would again. I know it's cruel but pffft they're only fish.
