OK Phalange, I don't want to go on endlessly on a post which I only made to remind people that the National was about to happen. But if you take the view, as you seem to, that racehorses are only bred for racing (true) but because some are killed in the course of that racing and that's unacceptably cruel, then, ergo, racing should be banned.
Which brings me right back to the point I've made already: without racing the horses wouldn't even exist. So the choice amounts to whether some two or three hundred thousand (or whatever) racehorses should even exist while accepting that there will inevitably be casualties from time to time in the actual racing; or whether that the relatively small amount of unintended cruelty involved in racing should result in it being banned altogether. If I were a horse (with a vote!) I'd take my chance on just existing in great care and comfort, and risk the catastrophic fall - which actually happens in only a tiny proportion of the total number of runs made by the horses.
And we should be clear that those same horses are not otherwise going to be bred just to look pretty in a meadow, waiting for some latter-day Stubbs to come along and make them famous. Nor, if I were to be able to afford, say, one leg of a horse (a quarter of its ownership) costing perhaps £20 to 50K, would I want it just sitting around in stables requiring very large sums of money just to keep it. I and the rest of my syndicate would want to see it out on the racecourse, when it was ready, starting to earn its living. Horses run, they enjoy running, it's part of their basic nature - so why not let them do so competitively for all our enjoyment.
Tony.
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