Martin Lee Stephenson Weblog

Animal Aid's Race Horse Death Watch was launched during the 2007 Cheltenham Festival. Its purpose is to expose and record every on-course Thoroughbred fatality in Britain.

The horse racing authorities have resolutely failed to put horse death information into the public domain, preferring to dismiss equine fatalities as ‘accidental’ and ‘unexplained’. Even when several horses die at a single meeting, the term ‘statistical blip’ is often deployed.

Animal Aid has produced a series of revealing reports over the last seven years exposing the welfare problems associated with Thoroughbred breeding, racing, training and disposal of commercially ‘unproductive’ horses. Our research indicates that around 420 horses are raced to death every year. About 38 per cent die on racecourses, while the others are destroyed as a result of training injuries, or are killed because they are no longer commercially viable.