Irish Examiner View: Exporting old or injured horses has to be called into question

Difficult times for Irish racing following Panorama documentary

Racing will inevitably suffer a backlash following the screening of last night’s BBC Panorama programme filmed covertly at the only British abattoir licensed to shoot racehorses, the majority of them from these shores.

Many of the principal accusations were sent out on a press release on Sunday — a standard audience-building and appetite-whetting technique — and are designed to sow disenchantment about an industry which brings pleasure to millions, is an important employer and wealth-creator in the Republic, and which contributes to the image of the nation.

Animal Aid, the significant and influential activist group which provided the footage, dismisses any “heavily romanticised” view of horse racing and wishes to see its end, as it is “intrinsically cruel and exploitative” and “fails to take care of horses when they are deemed to no longer be of use”.

Both the Grand National and the Cheltenham Festival are high on their target list for abolition and reform. Major breeding and bloodstock businesses are also firmly in their sights.

Animal Aid are weighty critics who have invested in research and who understand how to manipulate the levers of public opinion, which is highly volatile in respect of animal welfare. Last night’s programme was aired just a week before the opening of the much anticipated seven-day Galway Festival which is seen as another step towards post-Covid normality, despite the restrictions on spectator numbers.

Conditions and practises within a British-based slaughterhouse — let us call it what it is — are not governed or managed or established by Irish or even British horse racing authorities, but are under the scrutiny of the UK’s Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) and its Food Standards Agency. That is where the primary set of questions must be addressed.

Irish and British racing is an integrated sport, and it is wholly reasonable for trainers here to ask whether medium and long-term interests are best served by continuing to export old or injured animals across a sea border to become someone else’s “out-of-sight, out-of-mind” problem. 

It should not be beyond our collective wit to find a more humane response closer to home. That should be high on the agenda when the authorities respond, as they will have to.