Tuesday’s confirmation that more than 200 horses suffered fatal injuries on British racecourses in 2018 – the highest total since 2012 – arrived at an unfortunate moment for the British Horseracing Authority, which has made a stumbling start to the new year. The regulator had already backed down on a proposal to insist that all horses in jumps races are fully shod when it released a statement on Monday that supported a decision by the Uttoxeter stewards to impose a £140 fine on the trainer Henry Oliver, who waved his arms behind one of his horses to persuade it to set off with the rest of the field.
In fact, the statement did rather more than simply support the Uttoxeter stewards’ decision. Instead, it seemed to attempt to set the fine in the context of an entirely fresh philosophical approach to the sport, in which “we do not force horses to race and that they do so of their own free will”. It was a suggestion that attracted immediate and widespread ridicule, and the BHA backed down so swiftly that, sadly, there was no chance for an imaginative jockey to use it in their defence in a non-triers inquiry. “I wanted to win, sir, I really did, but my horse has free will and he wanted to sit 25 lengths off the lead.”
Yet the fact that it could be committed to print in the first place hints at a changing outlook at the BHA when it comes to welfare issues and concerns. It is a new mood that seems to tally with the oft-expressed belief of Nick Rust, the BHA’s chief executive, that racing’s continued existence – never mind its prosperity – depends on a “social licence” from the British public. Racing, he suggests, will be held in breach of the licence conditions and suffer the consequences if it does not adapt to changing attitudes to animal welfare concerns in the wider population.
Rust spoke about the idea at some length last month when the BHA published the findings of a review commissioned after seven horses died as a result of injuries sustained at last year’s Cheltenham Festival. “We have a social licence for our sport,” Rust said. “We can’t simply rely on the fact that racing takes place around the world and we run a similar sport here. We have to consider the social licence here at home in Great Britain. The younger generation and others are looking to us. Our sport is certainly not any form of busted flush in that regard [welfare], we have a decent record, but we must go further and faster and drive standards ever higher, such that the balance of the British public accepts British racing and retains our social licence to continue.”
It is an interesting idea and there is doubtless some truth in it, though it could be argued that in an increasingly urbanised society, the “balance of the British public” is unlikely to give horse racing a second thought from one year (or Grand National) to the next. In recent years, meanwhile, the most flagrant breach of the social licence was committed by racing’s partners in the betting industry, when they turned high-street betting shops into FOBT – or fixed odds betting terminals – casinos, offering roulette at £100 a spin. Rust, as it happens, was a senior executive at Coral and Ladbrokes at the height of the FOBT boom, at a time when racing seemed more interested in media rights payments from expanding betting-shop chains than the social ills that followed.
The problem, of course, with the idea of a social licence is that its terms are not written down and open to interpretation as a result. At present, the BHA seems to be living in fear of breaching its conditions, leading in turn to an unnecessarily defensive approach to issues on which the sport has very little to be ashamed about. Last week’s figures for fatal injuries on the track are a case in point. At first sight, it is true: a rise from 167 fatalities in 2017 to 202 in 2018 is a sudden, unexplained spike. But the five-year rolling average of 0.2% remains as low as at any point in the sport’s long history. Put another way, since 2014 there has been one fatal injury to a horse for every 500 starts.
The current five-year average is also down by almost a third from the rate of 0.27% at the turn of the century. This is not down to luck or variance, but instead the result of deliberate efforts by the regulator to reduce risks wherever possible, and no reason at all for racing to be on the defensive.
Racing’s most committed (and vocal) opponents may suggest that the racecourse is little more than a killing field, where a fatal injury is a matter of when rather than if, but the truth is that fatalities were extremely rare 20 years ago and even more unusual now. For other large, domesticated mammals such as beef cattle, the premature death rate is, and always will be, 100%.
Thoroughbreds are born and bred to race and, without the racecourse and its very small but inescapable risk of injury, this extraordinary breed, with speed and strength that have been honed over centuries by generations of breeders, would soon be extinct. Having taken it upon ourselves to breed, train and race them, we clearly have a duty too to ensure that the number of horses suffering a fatal or long-term injury is kept to an absolute minimum. Some degree of risk, though, will always be inherent to the process of galloping a half-ton horse around a track and, frequently, over obstacles at speed, and we are at, or very close to, a point where further change – a cut in field sizes, say – would start to interfere with the essential fabric of the sport.
Rust, like many racing professionals and fans, was taken aback by the hostility of several contributors to a parliamentary debate on racehorse protection in Westminster Hall last October. One – somewhat rhetorical – question in particular attracted much attention, when Luke Pollard MP, the Labour member for Plymouth Sutton and Devonport, asked: “When will we get to 0.1%, by what date? What steps will be taken to get there? What happens if we do not get there? When will the target be zero?”
At the time, it struck me as astonishing that anyone with such an inadequate grasp of the concept of risk could possibly play a role in steering the country’s future. In recent weeks, admittedly, it has seemed increasingly plausible, but that is no reason for racing, if or when it defends its record on welfare, to surrender to ignorance.