Riding Meat

Horseracing. That's still a thing. Once a year the Grand National happens and Britain's papers  are filled with pictures of women in hats and disingenuous headlines that refer to the death of some horses as a 'Tragedy' despite the fact that it is really more of a Formality, and is anything but unexpected. Two horses were injured so badly they had to be put down at Aintree last weekend; the same thing happened to five horses at Cheltenham last month. This is par for the course.

The races are sick. That's obvious. But the systematic cruelty of the industry behind them is less well-publicised. The champs that get to die at Aintree are only the tip of the iceberg: Around 380 horses can be expected to die each year on courses or in training, and around 2,000 will be slaughtered before that stage if their bodies are found to be 'unsuitable' -  sometimes it's hard to be a woman. I mean horse. In terms of inhumanity and waste, horseracing can be compared to factory farming, but this isn't for food, it's for fun.


The Grand National has been adapting the courses a little bit to try and cut down on the corpse-count, but since everything about horseracing is cruel, the practice should be scrapped, not reformed. Inbreeding and the stresses of jumping over fences (a noble cause!) leave the majority of racehorses with conditions including gastric ulcers and bleeding lungs. And as this report explains, vivisection is being used as a method of finding solutions to this problem. Inflicting suffering to  find a cure for suffering that is completely unnecessary. If we don't allow fox-hunting or bullfighting, then why is this bloodsport still legal?

Especially considering the only part most people are interested in is Ladies' Day. Hooray for an opportunity to call women fillies and pore over photos of them while saying how stupid they look! And people pay to be treated like that. Fair enough if they enjoy themselves, though they might have a rethink if we renamed the event Whoresracing, and laid bets on who would turn up the least dressed and orange-est. I'm not sure if the people who make the Telegraph's Worst Dressed List get taken out and shot, but it would be keeping with the spirit of the occassion.

Theatre of Blood

Readers who, like me, keep a keen eye on those goofy animal stories halfway down the Daily Mail homepage (stoner chihuahuas, anyone? Chocoholic fish?) will have noticed that bullfighting in Spain is to be 'developed and protected' in the face of well-publicised movements to institute a ban.

A statement made by the Ministry of Culture, which described corrida de toros as 'an artistic discipline and cultural product' reinforces the bloodsport's status as a symbol of Spanish nationalism, and comes as a direct response to last year's banning of bullfights in Catalonia.

The Catalan campaign against bullfighting was itself interpreted as a defiant reaction to the striking down of Catalonia's statute of autonomy in July 2010. The campaign - to extend animal protection laws to include the bulls and horses that are (ab)used in bullfights - was called Prou! - 'Enough!' in Catalan. The language issue highlights the political tensions between Spain and its autonomous communities: public use of Catalan was repressed under Franco and although its usage has been restored and encouraged since 1975 it is still a language that asserts difference from the Spanish mainstream.

Historically bullfighting is no less Catalan than it is Spanish, but corrida in the twenty-first century is posited as a kind of blood-soaked national anthem, and marketed as a tourist industry. Despite its cultural status, it does not necessarily mean much to ordinary citizens: most spectators of bullfights in Madrid are tourists, while in 2010 more than 60,000 inhabitants of Madrid signed a petition calling for a vote on banning them. The regional government's response was to declare the corrida protected as a part of Madrid's cultural heritage.

As is often the case, what should be a question about fundamental animal rights has been overshadowed by different political and emotional issues, in this case disputes about regional autonomy and national identity. Ideally EU animal protection laws would be stringent and comprehensive enough to protect all animals under its jurisdiction; the right to life should not be subject to cultural relativism. It is disgraceful that a tradition that involves the torture and slaughter of goaded and frightened animals can still be defended and even praised as an 'artistic discipline and cultural product.'

A country can embrace its history of warfaring, imperialism, slavery or head-shrinking, as the case may be - the  past should not be forgotten or censored, good or bad. The continued development and protection of a practice that is clearly in breach of internationally accepted standards of animal welfare cannot be justified or, I hope, sustained.