Grand National

I've never really got involved with horseracing or the GN but flicked over and caught a few minutes of it. My god it was awful to watch, very distressing. Seeing all those horses falling over is horrendous. Imagine the outrage if two jockeys had died? Yet the horses that have no choice in the matter die every year and yet it continues. I dont even like horses but this is barbaric.

This may be a stupid question but don't know a great deal about horses or the GN ..

If it's just a leg break why do they have to be put down? Even if it has ruined their career as a racehorse surely they can still live a happy life somehwere else in a field or whatever if the leg eventually heals properly? ☹️

Horses can't rest and recover in the same way we can and the break would never heal so to euthanise is the kindest thing to do (apparently).

And this is the thing that sickens me most about the Grand National particularly. I can't argue well against a horse-owner who tells me that horses want to run, they love to race. I don't know, I am not very horsey! But the Grand National (and maybe other steeplechases) aren't a natural expression of a horse's desire to run, they are course designed to trick horses into dangerous positions. How can any racecourse justify lowering a landing site so far below the takeoff point? The horse has very little time to correct and is likely on an incorrect stride pattern.

Imagine a person jumping over a foot high fence and then seeing it was a four foot drop on the other side? Broken legs might be a lucky escape.

You are right, I was looking at the deaths at each jump.

Well I didnt win any money this year.☹️

Horses can and do recover from broken legs but they would have to be on box rest for months and months, which isn't nice for a horse. They would usually need to be harnessed too, to support the weight of the horse. It's often better to "put it out of it's misery" before it feels the pain though. There's also infections and pneumonia to worry about.

If any human sport saw deaths at such a rate, it would be scrapped, but yet people seem to accept it as being "part of life" when it's animals.

Pah.

Thankfully, it seems that with every passing year, more and more people realise how barbaric this event this is.

Hopefully it won't be too long before it's scrapped.

It'll never get scrapped. They make too much money from it.

I've never really watched it and certainly wouldn't bet on it.

Even when F1 had many deaths and injuries during the 70/80s, it was the drivers that had to pay for their own medical cover and ambulances as the track owners didn't care. It took years of campaigning, more accidents and threatening to boycott races for there to be changes.

Realistically, if it's that hard to get safer measures in for a human life, then those money grabbing organisers aren't going to care about some poor horses ☹️