Jockeys: In March 2012 Damien Oliver was sickeningly speared into the turf when Like An Eagle broke a leg 200 metres from the start at Moonee Valley. He survived that fall, which came seven years to the day after a fall at the same track had resulted in titanium rods and screws being inserted into his back.
Research compiled by the AJA [Australian Jockeys’ Association] reported that of the 860 jockeys who ride in almost 20,000 races every year in Australia, a massive 89 per cent have had at least one fall that has required medical attention. Find any other profession in modern Australia where that kind of collateral damage to its key workers is acceptable.
There are 2,690 race meetings at 370 racetracks – big and small – across Australia every year. At every one, jockeys are putting their lives on the line. For protection they wear just a hardhat and an inflexible vest, which many fear might actually contribute to neck injuries. Jockeys who have ridden in Japan have brought back the flexible Descente vest, but they are still waiting for it to be given the green light for Australian courses.
Despite these concerns, jockeys go out every day, stretching themselves to the limit of their ability, jostling for space, battling to win – on powerful animals that weigh over 500kg and power along in a thundering burst of muscle and sinew at 65km/h. The jockeys do this perched high in the stirrups, balanced unnaturally in order to maximise the horse’s speed.
Anything can go wrong – and it frequently does. A rein or stirrup can break, a saddle can come loose, a horse can trip, break a leg, or suffer a heart attack. Any of these will send a rider tumbling nose-down into the turf. Almost 10 per cent of all jockeys have reported that they have fallen from their mounts more than twenty times.
AJC [Australian Jockey Club] president Paul Innes led a campaign for more funds to help jockeys. During the 2008-09 season, the AJA launched a campaign for ‘a tiny sliver of the growing pie of race prize money’ to be put towards a sensible raft of measures to protect jockeys. It was a compelling argument. The pitch was for just one per cent of prize money to be put into a fund to cover jockeys for a national insurance scheme for accidents and public liability. Given the risks, jockeys’ insurance premiums are high; many could not afford the fees and so were racing uninsured and unprotected. Jockeys like Ray Silburn, who took a fall in 2005, aged 38, and was left a C4 quadriplegic – the father of two subsequently split from his wife – were left exposed when trouble hit. ‘Our industry has many stakeholders,’ Innes said at the time. ‘In a decade of campaigning for a fair go for jockeys, I’ve witnessed a lot of buck-passing and not a lot of responsibility.’
In March 2009, an agreement was reached with the Australian Racing Board that one per cent of prize money would be set aside to fund public liability insurance, personal accident insurance, and welfare programs for jockeys. That one per cent represents around $4.5 million a year. Half of that goes towards paying jockeys’ insurance, while the other half is held by the state and territory racing authorities and goes towards welfare programs.
Horses: Forehand-style whipping is limited from the start of a race, while jockeys are allowed to whip at their own discretion for the last 100m. A 2011 RSPCA study found that whipping a horse did not increase its chances of winning a race, and that 98 per cent of horses were being whipped with no influence on the outcome of the race.
After the last RSPCA report, Racing NSW’s chief steward, Ray Murrihy, indicated that this was clearly going to be a long-running battle. ‘We are not going to regulate on the run just because of one study by one [group],’ he blasted.
But the day after the release of the report, he took objection to jockey Nash Rawiller’s use of the whip at Broadmeadow [in NSW]. ‘He looked like he was felling a tree,’ said Murrihy. ‘The well-being of the thoroughbred is paramount. The use of the whip has been cut down by 50 per cent since 2009.’
In the old days, horses were zapped with a jigger. Known as ‘batteries’, ‘jacks’, or ‘harps’, these were handheld devices that could give a horse a nasty jolt of electricity to speed it up. A former jockey wrote to the Sydney Morning Herald racing writer Max Presnell to explain how they worked: ‘All apprentices (no exceptions) at some time were given a hand jigger at trackwork and told to give the horse a prod down the neck as soon as they straightened up. About the size of a matchbox and with an elastic band to twine through your fingers, it generally had a retractable contact when pressed against the horse’s neck.’
These handheld jiggers were soon replaced with electric saddles, which could give a jolt of electricity down both saddle flaps in the home straight. Jiggers were generally used in trackwork; the policing of the sport meant they could be too easily discovered if they were used in a race.
Many horses react badly to being electrocuted. Those that respond to the electric jolts by speeding up, however, are embraced by trainers looking for an edge. In the actual race, jockeys would give a loud roar and jab the butt of the whip – in the old days it would have a shoeing nail tacked into it – into the horse’s neck to replicate the bolt of electricity.
According to some, however, getting hit with a whip or zapped with a jigger is the last thing a racehorse needs to be worried about. When Sirrocean Storm’s agonised death on the track caused an uproar from animal-rights campaigners, racing commentator Brendan Cormick wrote in the Weekend Australian: ‘Rest assured, his life would have been a lot shorter as a slow racehorse had he not been able to turn to jumping, where life was prolonged and enriched.’
He was right. In the racing industry they call it ‘wastage’.
Cormick wrote: ‘At a recent horse sale in Adelaide, 130 lots went under the hammer and 20 per cent of those were taken away to the abattoir. Not much love and attention there.’
Horseracing has a massive turnover of horses – the ones that die on the track are just the tip of the iceberg. A 2004 survey of trainers found that almost 40 per cent of thoroughbreds were lost to the industry every year through poor performance, behavioural problems, or breakdowns. That’s almost 125,000 horses. At least 7,500 go straight to the knackery. Many more end up there via the auctions.
Studies have found that one of the biggest reasons for the premature retirement of a horse is a lack of winnings. Fifty per cent of racehorses earn less than $500 in their first years of racing, and 40 per cent earn nothing at all. Keeping and training a thoroughbred costs about $10,000 in the first year, which rises to $28,000 by the third year − and that’s just for the training. Food, shelter, and transport come on top.
Eventually, for some owners it becomes a commercial reality that slow horses must go to the knacker’s yard. The $500 the owner pockets from the glue maker is often the only money they make from their investment in thoroughbred racing.
Meanwhile, the lucky breeders cash in on the next big thing. For every 1,000 pregnancies to thoroughbred mares, only 300 foals actually go on to race. Of those, just 10 per cent ever make it into the winners’ circle. The others are farmed out to various other parts of the equine industry − such as riding schools and private enthusiasts − while the highly-strung and the very slow end up as pet food in Australia and as meat in the lion and tiger enclosures in Japanese zoos.
According to the Rural Industries Research and Development Corporation, between 30,000 and 40,000 horses are slaughtered in Australia annually for pet and human consumption. That’s right, food for humans. Horsemeat cannot be sold in Australia for human consumption but it is a big part of Australia’s export trade. Countries like Japan, Russia, Switzerland, Belgium, and France consider Australian horsemeat a delicacy. Abattoirs prefer young, well-muscled racehorses to tired old nags.
A 2008 study of horsemeat in one of only two Australian abattoirs licensed to export it for human consumption found that just over half of all horses slaughtered there had come from the racing industry. The Coalition for the Protection of Racehorses estimates that 18,000 of the horses slaughtered annually are racehorses. Every year around 2,000 tonnes of horsemeat is exported from Australia to feed people in places such as the Hot Horse Burger Bar in Park Tivoli, Ljubljana, Slovenia.
Things are no better across the Tasman. A recent investigation by New Zealand’s Herald on Sunday spoke to six transport operators who truck slow, expensive, and unloved thoroughbreds to slaughter at the Clover Export Ltd abattoir in Gore. Putting a horse out to clover in New Zealand has a very different connotation – it generally means the animal will end up on a dining table in Russia, Belgium, or Switzerland.
Long-term South Island-based horse transporter Bernie Hutton told reporter Sally Webster that business is booming.
‘Yes, they are often slaughtered very young due to the nature of the industry – but the other side of that is that young thoroughbreds do provide excellent meat for export,’ he said. ‘And frankly, the way some of them are neglected, it seems a better fate for them.’
