The Slow Decline of Our Cruelest Sport

This year, things were different. I didn't watch, let alone enjoy the holiday—I live overseas now, and I'm troubled by horse racing as an industry. But on a larger scale, the mood in Australia has shifted, too; one survey found that this year, just 11% of Australians reported "high interest" in the cup. Long term sponsor Myer dropped out after 40 years. And in response to growing concern and anger over horse welfare, for the first time since its inauguration in 1983 (with the exception of two years during the COVID-19 pandemic), the race wasn't followed by the annual Melbourne Cup Parade.

Victoria Racing Club (VRC) canceled the usual victory tour through the streets of Melbourne by horses and jockeys. Organizers cited costs and animal rights activists as the main reason for the cancellation. It was the latest in a series of slow rumbles shaking the horse racing industry.

Across the globe, horse racetracks are closing

For those who do wish to attend horse race events, options are more limited than they used to be. Quietly, and without a huge deal of fanfare, racetracks across the US and other high profile horse racing countries are closing.

In California, Golden Gate Fields announced it would close by the end of 2023, but was then delayed to close sometime in 2024. The Stronach Group, the owner of Golden Gates Fields, announced their closure of the racetrack as a move to "double down" on their racing and training at Santa Anita Park in Arcadia and San Luis Rey Downs in Bonsall. Golden Gates Fields had stables in Berkeley, where a proposed ordinance will establish a "racehorse protection policy" after repeated deaths and claims of animal abuse: 15 horses died at Golden Gate Fields in 2023.

The decline of horse racing worldwide

The steady closure of racetracks feels symptomatic for wider losses to the horse racing industry.

Across the US, more than 40 tracks have closed since 2000. In the UK, the past 50 years has seen the closure of dozens of racecourses, many in a bid to find more space during a housing boom. Similarly, in Singapore the country's last race course closed in 2023 to make space for public housing.

It's telling that so many racetracks have closed worldwide for land scarcity reasons. Racetracks consume huge amounts of space for entertainment which may not be justified when compared to housing crises or other space demands. But it's not just a search for space: horse racing itself is rapidly losing popularity.

The Jockey Club discovered in a 2022 study that attendance at horse races in the US had declined by 30% since 2000. In 1989, there were more than 74,000 horse races in the US; in 2022, there were only 33,453. In 2022 in the UK, horse racing attendance dropped to less than 5 million people for the first time since the Racecourse Association started publishing the numbers in 1995.

Part of the reason for the decline in horse racing interest is the advance of other, more modern forms of gambling. For a long time, horse racing was one of the only legal forms of gambling, and the advent of casinos in the 1970s saw a big dip in horse racing fanatics. The advent of the internet and online gambling has only consolidated that impact.

The decline isn't only about a lack of interest, though—in fact, part of the reason for the sport's slowdown is because many people are taking a huge interest in horse racing, and its cruel ramifications. The environmental activists who worked together to cancel Melbourne Cup Parade have made their voices heard globally, too. In Australia, independent polling shows that 64% of Australians believe that racing animals, like horses and greyhounds, is cruel. A 2023 poll in the UK found that most British people believe that the Grand National—a massive horse racing event, which has killed 62 horses since 2000—is cruel to horses. After a particular tragedy in the US, when the race horse Eight Belles collapsed and was put down during the 2008 Kentucky Derby, a Gallup poll found that 38% of Americans supported banning animal racing.

Is the Kentucky Derby cruel to horses?

In 2023, 12 horses died at Churchill Downs, the site of the Kentucky Derby. This was deemed an unusually high amount of fatalities. (It’s estimated that every day, about six horses are killed by the horse racing industry.) Seven horses sustained fractures and injuries via racing and training on the dirt track. Two horses sustained fractures racing on the turf track. Two others died suddenly through exercise. One had a traumatic paddock injury. And while the investigation did not find an immediate correlation between racetrack surfaces and their deaths, one veterinary expert found that all the dead horses had run more races than the average racehorse—making them more susceptible to life-threatening injuries.

Much of the cruel treatment of horses raised to race mirrors the treatment of animals raised for food. Extreme confinements. Unnatural methods leading to skeletal injuries, mental health issues, and other bodily problems. Treated as an inconvenience to be discarded after no longer being seen as useful. A glaring gap between their lifespans in human hands in contrast to their natural lifespans. A callous death after a cruel life–-bodies bred to be strained to the limit for human consumption.

And despite growing opposition to the unquestionable cruelty of horse racing, 2024 marks a significant year for its fans: the 150th anniversary of the Kentucky Derby. Though horse racing is in decline, the 150th Derby has created an unprecedented demand for tickets. Since 2020, Churchill Downs has limited attendance to around 150,000 people. The 2023 Kentucky Derby exceeded the attendance cap for the first time since the COVID-19 pandemic began. However, 2023 attendance records were still smaller than any of 2005-2019 Derbys.

To commemorate this milestone year, Churchill Downs underwent some expensive changes—a $200 million facilities paddock renovation, the most lucrative prize amount in the race’s history, even improved cell service. As for the horses forced to compete in the 150th Derby, little has changed for their fate.

A race to save horses

Why do so many people globally believe horse racing is cruel?

Well, because it is cruel. Horse racing is an industry rife with systematic animal abuse, from the moment when young foals are separated too early from their mothers for training to the cruelly cut-short end many racehorses meet, suffering an early, painful, and preventable death on the racecourses they were bred for.

According to numbers from the Jockey Club, from 2009 to 2022 7,062 horses died at American racetracks. In Australia, one horse dies on a racetrack every 2.5 days on average. In 2019, the Santa Anita racetrack in Southern California shut down for nearly a month after 23 horses died in the span of just three months. Poor racetrack conditions may be elevating deaths and injuries, but usually individual jockeys or drug issues are blamed.

And this is just horses who make it to the track. Even more deaths happen globally in training or trials, but are rarely reported. There are also large numbers of young horses who are bred for racing but never make it that far; for example, in Australia only 300 out of every 1000 foals will ever start in a race. The other 700 are considered 'useless,' meaning that thousands of young horses globally are discreetly sent to early slaughterhouse deaths. Horrifically, the horse racing industry calls this practice 'wastage.'

The life of a race horse is full of stress, misery and drugs. Doping scandals continually rock the industry. A 2014 New York Times report highlighted one prominent race horse trainer who forced injured horses to run, over-drugged horses and used shockers to buzz horses for training (a practice which is ostensibly banned).

If a horse survives her racing career, it's expensive to keep her alive: many owners choose instead to kill their horses, even when this is illegal, as in the US. In 2022, an estimated 20,000 horses were exported to their deaths in Mexico or Canada; their meat was usually sold for consumption to Europe or Asia.

This is only the tip of the iceberg. The horse racing industry is so full of cruelty that repeated attempts at reform have not yet had any real or widespread success. It is simply structured systematically around animal abuse. It's no surprise that for many of us, the only way to save race horses is to stop them from having to race.

An industry that hurts everyone

Horse racing isn't any good for humans, either. Industry practices put jockeys at risk, as well as the horses they ride; on average, two jockeys die and sixty are paralyzed each year, and the industry is also grappling with higher rates of mental health and illness amongst jockeys than other elite sportspeople.

Off the field, spectators are also suffering. According to experts, horse racing is a gateway to gambling addiction. One Australian study found that nearly one million Australians regularly gambled on horse and dog racing and that in an average month, 41 cents in every dollar spent on race betting by regular race bettors came from a person with moderate to severe gambling problems.

And these huge social occasions at the racetrack come with their dark side. The normalization of drinking and gambling leads to reported higher levels of assault, violence, and domestic abuse. When I was a kid, I loved getting a day off school for Melbourne Cup Day, but for too many families, it was a day of fear and retribution: domestic violence rises significantly on Melbourne Cup Day.

The finish line

In the wild, horses love to run—and run fast: there are still places in the world where you can watch wild horses running free. Moving fast and joyfully comes naturally to thoroughbreds, but winning a race is a human construct. Instead, horses—who are prey animals—prefer the safety of the middle of the pack. They want to run as a group. They want to keep each other safe. They want to run fast, away from harm, rather than toward it.

This year in Melbourne, in place of the Melbourne Cup Parade, Elio Celotto, the campaign director of Nup to the Cup, gathered with other activists to hold a vigil where the parade usually runs.

"We will be there to pay respect to the 168 horses who have been killed in the 22-23 racing season and the thousands more who disappear without a trace," Celotto told journalists.

It was a Melbourne Cup event at last worth attending.