Every year at Aintree, near Liverpool, a great event is held – it is the Grand National, one of the most famous of all steeplechases, a discipline that is found in Italy too. The horses are forced to gallop almost 7 km. over a track filled with obstacles to be jumped. The jumps are particularly dangerous, since they traditionally consist of hedges and stone walls (totally blocking the horses’ view of what lies beyond them) and are often followed by broad ditches. Last Saturday’s racing claimed the lives of two thoroughbreds, the two latest victims among so many others.

In steeplechasing it is taken for granted that horses will fall. As reported in an article published by La Repubblica, 36 horses died in the only Grand National in the last fifty years. On the British racetracks, no less than 41 horses lost their lives in competitions of various sorts since the beginning of this year, 23 in the month of March. The experts stated that the number of victims would have been even higher, if some of the races had not been cancelled due to bad weather. Moreover, dozens and dozens of horses were injured, sometimes very badly, and no one knows what happens to them afterwards.

The people who work in this field and the cheering thousands in the grandstands call them “accidents”…for us instead they are part of the further spectacularizing of a machine that makes money by exploiting horses and killing animals that, by nature, would never dream of competing...and absolutely never of jumping obstacles of that kind.

Horses (equus caballus, an animal species evolved as a prey for other animals, and still acting as such today) in the state of nature, act in a totally different manner from what we see them forced to do in equestrian sports, horse racing, Western riding and all the other so-called sports activities. This is no new discovery by IHP, but a fact based on ethological studies of these splendid animals.
Public opinion should now be informed of this fact. And by public opinion, we mean all the people who are not part of the so-called “horse world” and who regularly receive, thanks to the powerful Federations and the various racing and equestrian associations (not to speak of the Palio races), a highly distorted image of horses, as if they were animals that naturally wanted to train, to compete, or to play the clown, humiliated in front of a public that is totally unaware of their suffering…merely because it has no chance of getting to know horses as they really are.