29/04/2026

It all starts with a smartphone. A resident of San Cristoforo — one of the most troubled neighbourhoods in central Catania — films a pony harnessed to a sulky, surrounded by a swarm of scooters ridden by teenagers urging it to race along the street. The video is uploaded to YouPol, the Italian State Police app for citizen reports. Officers follow the trail to Via Greco, where they uncover two ghost stables: facilities never registered with the health authority, animals with no microchip, no testing for equine infectious anaemia. Those responsible face fines of around €6,500; the unregistered animal is transferred to a licensed facility.

The episode has been reported by the local press. It is only the latest frame in a phenomenon IHP has been monitoring and documenting for years across the Catania area: raids, seizures, illegal stables uncovered one after another, from April 2024 through to January 2026, when police — this time using drones — shut down a clandestine race in the surrounding area, arresting 15 people and seizing thoroughbred horses, clear evidence of the connection between official racing and the illegal circuit.

The pattern is always the same: unregistered facilities used to store and move animals off the radar, missing or falsified veterinary documentation, on-street training with motorcycle escorts. This is the "grey logistics" that precedes the actual races — and which, as IHP has repeatedly warned, intersects with criminal interests and illegal betting, with horses reduced to disposable tools.

The significance of this operation is twofold. On the technical level, it shows that combining technology — drones in open countryside operations, YouPol in urban neighbourhoods — with active citizen involvement can genuinely break the chain before a race even starts. On the systemic level, however, the challenge remains: without a thorough reform of the equine registry, without real traceability of ownership transfers and systematic inspections of facilities, the illegal network will always find a way through. The real victory, as IHP consistently argues, is not the raid itself — it is the race that never takes place.

(photo by Catania Police)