I’m sorry but the stance “no horse death is acceptable” is just not realistic, however much we would want that. I grew up with horses and have horses now and they get injured when they are just loafing about in a field, or playing with another horse.
Just last month one of my neighbour’s horses sustained a navicular injury in the field that meant it had to be put down. It was living its life happy in retirement, looked after beautifully by its owner, with no demands put upon it at all. Unfortunately many domestic horses sustain injury at pasture, not because they are being kept poorly, but because they are at one and the same time strong but fragile beings.
And horses which are wild and undomesticated do not live a particularly injury free life either. I visited wild herds in Argentina when I was younger and many of them were half starved, fly-bitten, hobbling on a horrible injury. I was horrified at the state of some of them.
Thoroughbreds are special athletes. They have been bred for speed. They have a heart the size of a football, and if you laid out their lungs flat they would cover the size of a football field. They even have a supercharger function when running fast that allows extra blood cells from the spleen to be released in to the blood stream to allow them to run faster. I don’t think there is anything wrong with an animal doing what it is bred to do for hundreds of years, as long as welfare standards are good and are improving year on year, which they are. Many trainers now offer good turnout and holidays and the average racehorse does not go to the track very often in its life and it lives a pretty good life among other horses in between time with high quality feed, and excellent veterinary care.
If you have ridden race horses you will know that in reality you don’t often have difficulty getting these beautiful creatures to move; it’s very much the case that you have problems stopping them running or bringing them to a halt.
Of course there are improvements to be made in all areas of equine sport as our understanding of equine science improves and develops and those improvements are being made. Racing is perhaps the last area to develop because it’s always been run by a very traditional realm of the establishment. In the main though, the folk that work in racing genuinely care about horses. There are always one or two bad apples but the majority want the best for their charges. Honestly, you hardly go in to it for the money nowadays; it’s more of a vocation to care for animals 24/7 in all weathers and not an easy life at all.
If racing gets banned then ultimately the beautiful creature that is the thoroughbred will go extinct, like the way the Suffolk Punch is going now. They are too expensive just to keep for fun and without race courses and gallops there will be virtually nowhere except the odd beach where they could run free. I don’t think it’s wrong for an animal that’s capable of galloping at 30 miles a hour and has been domesticated for thousands of years to have a job, exercise it’s limbs and muscles that have been designed for doors, and work alongside man as it always has, as long as welfare standards continue to improve as they are doing.
So many ex race horses now are being trained for other disciplines and the RoR do fantastic work in this area.