Three days ago, following months of alarming news from various associations representing the racetracks, companies, breeders and Italy’s flat and harness races, Federippodromi (an association of 12 companies running 14 Italian racetracks) announced that all Italian racetracks will be closed down on January 1st. A couple of days earlier, the Arcoveggio racetrack in Bologna had announced that it will close around the same time.

It is evident that we are experiencing what animal rights associations have been saying for many years. UNIRE (Italian association for improvement of the breed) is following the model of other countries, by trying to increase the exploitation of horses, paradoxically at a time when Italians have begun to lose interest in an industry of games and gambling based on the abuse of sentient beings, with bets dropping sharply year by year. In the first seven months of 2011, betting was 18.4% lower than during the same period in 2010.

At the racetracks, instead, they kept on working the horses even harder, trying to save resources by cutting maintenance expenses: in practice, by progressively lowering the age of horses running on racetracks, even below the age of two.
Any veterinary textbook can explain that a two-year-old horse is still a foal, with a bone and muscular structure that is still developing (and that will be fully mature only at the age of four). At two a foal, in a natural environment, is playing and learning to socialize with his own kind. while at the racetracks he is kept in a stall, trained, and forced to compete. At four the horse enters maturity, but if he has been raised to run, and fails to meet the requisites, he is already disposable and becomes a useless expense for the racing industry.

For many years horse racing has managed to survive and even to construct a positive image, also thanks to the existence of associations which have lent themselves to this purpose unknowingly, by helping to find homes for unwanted horses, and at times even organizing fund-raisers for this scope.
IHP has always considered this approach damaging and harmful to the protection of horses, since the end result is that the breeders have a wider opportunity of bringing ‘new blood’ into the industry.

We now read announcements such as the one by Federippodromi, and unfortunately, we are not surprised to see that no one is talking about the horses; which is entirely in line with how these people consider them, as mere objects.
The alarm is raised for the industries involved, the gamblers, and the people working at the racetracks, but not one word is spent for the approximately 220,000 horses (according to Unire-Assi’s database) who would be the first to be affected by this long-announced crisis in horse racing.

It is we, once again, who are worrying about the horses’ fate. IHP has written to the Minister of Agriculture and Forestry asking for an urgent meeting to discuss possible solutions, before the circumstances get out of hand and the animals are abandoned.

La Stampa article
La Repubblica article