11/06/2025
I was recently invited to the racetrack and offered a tour. I went because I didn’t want to just be angry from a distance. I wanted to understand. I didn’t want to dismiss something without seeing it for myself.
What I saw was complicated.
Many of the people there truly believe they’re doing what’s best for their horses. But good intentions don’t erase harm. You can love a horse and still be part of something that hurts them. That’s what makes this so difficult to confront, and so important to name.
I also saw stress, fatigue, fear and behaviours that told a very different story from the one people handling them believed.
Many genuinely saw tension or restlessness as excitement.
They didn’t recognize the signs of discomfort, not because they didn’t care, but because no one ever taught them to see it differently.
You walk through the racing spaces and see walls covered in photos, horses mid-stride, nostrils flared, eyes wide. And once you know what to look for, you can’t unsee it. You can match almost every image to a pain ethogram, and they would score.
When pain expressions are framed and celebrated as proof of achievement, it shows how deeply this culture has learned to see discomfort as success.
A system that hangs discomfort on the wall as a trophy is a system that cannot recognize harm even when it’s right in front of it. And we’re asking the people inside that system to open their eyes to something they’ve been taught to look away from for generations.
That’s why asking for change feels almost impossible.
There’s nothing ethical about breeding thousands of horses each year when so many already stand in kill pens and auction lines. There’s nothing ethical about glamorizing an industry where catastrophic injuries are treated as inevitable.
Because this isn’t just about the horses. It’s about people, people who have built their lives, livelihood, their identities, their sense of worth around this world. Admitting harm means questioning everything they’ve ever known.
The sport itself, the way it exists today, is built on the suffering of horses.
And it cannot be saved when the people inside it can’t see the damage being done. When suggestions for change are dismissed as outsider opinions, nothing moves forward. It’s impossible to heal a system when everyone within it believes it’s fine.
Cognitive dissonance keeps it alive.
It’s easier to defend cruelty than to admit you’ve been complicit in it.
And that’s why change is so hard. Because it asks people to unlearn everything they’ve been rewarded for believing. But this is exactly why naming harm matters and why recognizing stress behaviours and pain expressions matters.
Why we have to keep showing and discussig what others refuse to see.
Because every time someone learns to spot a pain face, or notices tension for what it really is,
a crack forms in the wall of denial that keeps this system standing. And cracks spread.
SO WE KEEP NAMING IT.
We keep pointing to it, even when it seems to fall on deaf ears, because it only takes one person willing to look in the mirror to start change from within.
We keep having these conversations with hope that people begin to see what we see. Because once you do, you can’t unsee it.
