Animal cruelty?

[curious]

 

[Chief Stipe]

Exaggerated claims.  The reality is very few horses in NZ are confined to a stall for 23 hours a day 365 days of the year.  

Being driven by this group:

Horseracing Wrongs is a 501(c)(3) non-profit committed to ending the cruel and deadly horseracing industry in the United States.

[Freda]

Yeah, easy to drive something like this to the unthinking..horses evolved as grazing, herd animals.  True enough.  But for as long as humans have used horses for anything other than food, they have been confined,  in some way or other, out of necessity.   Archeological digs have found the remains of horses chained to walls in Pompeii....I can just hear Alexander the Great saying, righto,  lads, the Hittites are coming, go and catch your horses.  I can see them now, tearing round a paddock in the dark to round up the war horses.  Just, no. At the least they'd have been tied to picket lines or hobbled.

Any performance horse, not just a racehorse, esp in and around large cities, has to spend most of its active life stabled.

NZ is one of the few places which has the scope to allow such horses space.  There are some magnificent equine establishments all over the world,  but such property is not available to all.  Even the French and UK/ Irish regimes, very different from here, certainly,  with the scope of the training grounds, still stable their horses. 

[Chief Stipe]

12 minutes ago, Freda said:

Any performance horse, not just a racehorse, esp in and around large cities, has to spend most of its active life stabled.

I'm not sure that in NZ and OZ they do.  Our trainers realise the importance of paddock/yard time and the benefits of spelling on good grass for decent periods of time.  They focus on two active stable/racing periods with spells in between.  So most horses get at least 2 to 3 months of grass paddock time a year and often with other horses as a group.  That works for fillies,  mares and geldings.  The expensive colts not so much.  But then naturally a stallion is somewhat of a loner and a fighter in the natural herd.

There is also the factor of line breeding of thoroughbreds and the nature vs nuture aspect.  From what I've seen many racehorses favour human contact over other horses.  In fact I've seen a pattern where the really good ones have a total disdain for their peers.  Those types actually seem to be bored in a paddock.  I know one in particular that just slopes around eating as much as it can. 

200 years of line breeding and they have adapted.

Modern stables are large and allow horses to see and hear each other.  Some will just pace up and down.  Good trainers know that a happy horse is a horse that will perform and they spend a lot of time making sure the horse has variation and time away from the stable.  

For example a trip to the beach is often on the agenda.  

 

 

One of the advantages we have in NZ is we still have access to large areas of good parture on rolling land.  Most top stables after purchasing yearlings let them down and they destress in large paddocks in groups.  I've seen a $1m+ yearling in a large paddock with 3 other yearlings and no cover on, covered in mud and just being a horse.  These spelling paddocks often become part of the horses regime for its life as a racehorse.  

 

[Newmarket]

When you think back over many years of movies, the amount of horses injured must have been huge…Hi Ho Silver

[Shad]

Also the amount of paddock injuries that we never hear about, be more than on the race track I reckon, out of site out of mind, unless your an owner, or it's a top stallion, and many of those been lost due to paddock injuries, horses are born to run, and accidents happen, just part of life, unfortunately racing always an easy target.

[Chief Stipe]

2 hours ago, Newmarket said:

When you think back over many years of movies, the amount of horses injured must have been huge…Hi Ho Silver

If you have seen what a band of horses running in the wild do you'd think racing was tame by comparison.

[Freda]

14 minutes ago, Chief Stipe said:

If you have seen what a band of horses running in the wild do you'd think racing was time by comparison.

Absolutely.   I've seen the dominant mare in a group knock a cheeky youngster to the ground, he watched his p's and q's after that.

[curious]

16 minutes ago, Chief Stipe said:

If you have seen what a band of horses running in the wild do you'd think racing was time by comparison.

Covered my eyes and held my breath many times watching yearlings, even mares and foals running in the paddock.