05/11/2025
🙏🙏🙏
Addressing some of the comments on my recent post about Half Yours and his bleeding mouth at the Melbourne Cup.
I am going to go through the common excuses made by people in that comment thread and what I’ve seen elsewhere online.
I am going to rebuttal them through my perspective as someone who galloped racehorses for 5 years and draw from my personal experiences.
1. “He just bit his tongue or cheek!”
That could well be the case. But, this doesn’t consider the fact that horses who are anxious in the mouth and teeth grinding, chomping the bit, crossing their jaw and otherwise fighting against the bit are exceptionally more likely to bite themselves.
All of these factors are influenced by stress and equipment used. We can’t gloss over an oral wound when it’s found in the mouth of a young animal who cannot openly consent to their work and is wearing a bit, a tightly fitted figure 8 noseband and a tongue tie.
2. “These horses are sharp and pull really hard, they can be hard to stop and it would be dangerous to not use the right equipment.”
This is absolutely correct. Some of the most difficult horses that I’ve ever ridden were racehorses. I was the fittest I had ever been in my life while I was galloping because of how hard these horses pull against the bridle, many of them trained to run into the bridle and be “on the muscle.”
The amount that I had to pull on some of them for control was not fair or ethical to the horses.
It absolutely would have been uncomfortable for them. The adrenaline that they felt probably cancelled out some of the pain, but that doesn’t make it any more unfair to the Horse.
For my safety, I had to hang onto them how I did, to avoid them running off and bolting. Which happened a fair few times regardless.
But, there were other solutions that could’ve been taken in training to avoid horses having this type of behavioural response in the first place.
Pulling and using harsher equipment or different types of nosebands to stop evasion of the bit also is not the only solution to creating safety.
We have more options than just “pile on more equipment and pull harder” or “let this horse run amok and endanger itself and everyone on the track.”
Training exists. Horses don’t need to be so anxious or hot that they’re uncontrollable without extreme force.
In the event that connections of the horse cannot help the horse adapt to engage in the environment safely without causing excess discomfort, that horse does not need to be on the racetrack.
I have restarted a LOT of OTTBs. With none of them did I ever normalize the heaviness in the bridle, the pulling or bolting.
With all of them, it was an issue that needed to be fixed.
Why should it be any different on the track?
If the horses need to be so keyed up and stressed that they’re constantly trying to run through their equipment when it’s not strong enough, how can we argue for the ethics of continuing this sport?
I, for one, don’t believe that high stress and excitability are prerequisites for a successful athlete, but many do and seek to normalize this behaviour as if it’s an inevitable when it’s a manmade issue.
3. “Horses can injure themselves in the field and bite their tongue.”
They sure can. Personally, I’ve never seen a bloody mouth from a tongue or cheek bite occur in the field.
There’s also a huge difference between a horse autonomously injuring themselves on their own free time and what happens to them in sport imposed on them by people, with equipment selected by people and when they’re placed in a high stress environment by people.
You cannot compare the two. Social turnout with space to move is a basic need for a horse. Racing for human entertainment is not.
Let’s stop comparing apples to oranges.
4. “These are young hot blooded horses bred to explode and many of them are intact males!”
Even more reason not to create an environment where they’re so stressed that more equipment is necessitated for control.
Even more reason to reconsider breeding practices if people are truly going to try to claim these are unavoidable traits in racehorses.
Even more reason to geld intact males who are dangerous without severe force on the part of humans.
None of these excuse stressing horses to the point where they’re dangerous to handle without forceful equipment.
5. “You’ve obviously never handled a racehorse before.”
I have and if the only response you have is an ad hominem attack, you can’t defend what you’re trying to defend and you’re admitting defeat. Come up with a better argument or start to be honest with yourself that you lack a defence for the practices you’re trying to normalize.
So, what’s the solution?
Well, all of these horses would be easier to handle if species appropriate care was normalized across the entire industry.
Frequent turnout, limited stalling. Social opportunities with other horses.
Addressing stress behaviours as they appear and dealing with the causes instead of just slapping on a nose or a lip chain and calling it a day.
No longer normalizing behaviours and injuries that are strongly correlated with stress and oversights on the part of humans.
The list goes on.
I’m tired of these excuses.
They all Center the human and fail to consider the role we all play in the lives our horses live.
If we are going to use horses in sport, we need to prioritize their welfare instead of coming up with every excuse in the book to avoid addressing it.
Out of all horse sports, racing probably asks of the horse the most natural behaviour: running in a straight line with sweeping turns.
It has the potential to be conducted a lot more ethically than it is currently but that will never happen so long as people deny the problems and refuse to consider need for change.
Out of all of the horses I’ve worked with, racehorses are amongst the most stressed with the highest instances of stall vices and studies support this.
At what point are we going to acknowledge what research is showing us and start to make systemic changes for the benefit of the horses?
There are more alternatives than just continuing as is or having a complete ban of the sport.
Reform and harm reduction is there and should happen in immediacy.
For everyone who fears a ban, that reality is made a lot more likely by continuously having things like this occur and creating bad optics surrounding the sport.
Seeing hoards of race trackers defending this and making excuses also isn’t a good look.
It doesn’t build trust in the public.
It doesn’t garner hope for improving the ethics of the sport.
It confirms people’s concerns that people are not interested in considering where practices could be improved for the horse.
It justifies the mindset that the sport is in such a state of disrepair that there is no way out.
Accidents happen, horses may bite their cheeks.
But so long as humans make excuse after excuse and fail to look at factors that make these “accidents” more likely, we will continue to see stuff like this.
Any accident in a sport where the horse cannot opt out of needs to be seen with more consideration.
We are their voices.
Don’t let their well-being go ignored.
Things don’t need to stay the same just because change has been overlooked year after year.
There are improvements that can be made.
We can do better by the horses.
But not if people refuse to consider that it’s necessary.
 When we don’t want to admit to a problem being present, it’s easy to deny the existence of it and make excuses.
I have done it. I did it for years across multiple disciplines. I did it when I had to justify how hard I was on some horses’ mouths on the racetrack.
But, at some point if we want to see meaningful change, we need to recognize it for what it is and speak out.
What dooms Horse sports is the refusal to change, not honestly looking at the problems and discussing solutions.
