We look at slavery now and go, oh my God, wasn't it terrible?
I think probably in a hundred years' time, people will look at how we kept animals.
Horse racing - the sport of billionaires and kings,
bankrolled by a gambling industry that entrenches
the wealth at the top of the sport.
I'm not a gambler at all. It doesn't interest me.
I gamble by breeding horses. Don’t do that.
It’s Britain’s second most popular sport, with friends in high places.
I am very grateful for all the support I have received over the years from racing,
and I want to put that on the record.
But it remains a divisive industry, not helped
by recent leaks that critics argue point to a malaise at the heart of the sport.
Have you ever thought, with a dead horse lying there - oh, I might sit on that.
No, no.
It may well be that horse racing causes distress to the horse, having a bit placed in its mouth,
and being ridden around by a whip-wielding ape.
With thoroughbred welfare in the spotlight, racing is opening up to the outside world.
The racehorse should be celebrated.
We do a hell of a lot for them, and they do a hell of a lot for us.
What ends up for a lot of them is they'll be passed
on from owner to owner to owner until the luck runs out.
What will it take for this industry PR drive to improve the lives of all the sport’s horses?
It's money. Money talks.
And bullshit walks.
Not everyone is onboard with racing’s attempts to sell itself to a new audience.
Seen as a controversial figure by the industry, Dene Stansall is an activist whose campaign group,
Animal Aid, wants to see horse racing banned completely.
I thought you'd be sort of persona non grata around here.
Aren't you public enemy number one?
Yeah. I'm not an anarchist. I'm not an anarchist.
I'm just one of hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people around the
world who feel the same way.
What you’re calling for is for them not to exist.
What you're seeing is a human invention.
That is not a natural horse.
The legs are a length, the lung capacity, the heart capacity
has all been inbred to make a horse run fast.
Oh, they're down already. Quick, quick, quick, quick.
This horse, number seven with the green stripe, got a grackle noseband on.
Here’s Frankie Dettori in the red.
Got a hood on to try to calm the horse down, because the horse is anxious.
Here at the starting stalls we see something that people don’t see in the stands,
we see behind the scenes almost.
Get me the blind guys, put the fucking blind on him ... – Quick as we can boys ...
What just happened there?
The horse was the last in the stalls and there was other horses getting agitated
because they had been in there a while, which made that horse a little bit nervous
about going into that confined environment.
and as we heard her say ‘get a fucking hood on the horse’.
So the horse is starting to become the victim of this,
the horse is the problem, even though that horse was a very, very mentally stable horse,
and we can tell that because of the bridling.
But this is just an unfortunate side product of what is a fantastic sport.
Fantastic to the human being,
fantastic to the people who get pleasure from it.
But is it so fantastic for the horses?
We whip them, we put gear on the heads,
hoods, bits in the mouths, nose bands that confine them, tongue ties.
We've seen 200 horses die in a year on racecourses.
We see horses going to the slaughterhouse.
We see overbreeding, unregulated breeding.
They're failing horses on a huge, huge scale,
and this is a major animal welfare issue that's been long overdue for being addressed.
It’s probably fair to say the view from inside the industry is different.
Richard Phillips is a trainer who had an idea to open up
the racing world to the general public,
inspired by a Taylor Swift controversy he read about on social media.
Her Twitter followers didn't want her to sing in the Melbourne Cup
because there had been fatalities in the Melbourne Cup.
And her Twitter followers thought that horse racing was immoral.
Yeah.
That made me think, well, we need to go on the front foot a bit.
Richard’s idea led to the creation of National Racehorse Week,
a PR initiative aimed at celebrating the life of the thoroughbred,
and widening the sport’s appeal.
Does racing have an image problem?
I don't know if it has an image problem.
But I think that what racing needs to do is to open its doors, which it’s doing.
Let the general public decide whether they think this is a moral sport.
If you go up with Tash twice up and you go twice up as well,
just get him relaxed at the back.
OK. Off we go.
They have 24-hour care, throughout the day.
Well they’re incredibly pampered animals, aren’t they?
Yeah and why wouldn’t we, because if you don’t
put the horses first, they’ve got less chance of being first.
What they don’t have is any freedom.
I wouldn’t say that. They do get turned out to paddocks during their exercise
but it’s not a naturally bred animal, it’s been bred to be a racehorse.
Just quickly, where are we going?
Where are you taking us?
We're going on the gallop here,
and they'll be coming up here cantering in a minute, stretching their legs.
Though only a small percentage of horses will die on-course,
it’s a reality of the sport that many trainers will be familiar with.
Richard lost one of his best horses,
Celestial Magic, in a fall at Market Rasen racecourse in early 2020.
We lose a couple of hundred racehorses every year.
And that’s just on the track.
Yeah, absolutely.
I get the argument, some people think, you know,
you should not put a horse into that position in life.
I would argue that I think you can, because
of the efforts that are made by us all to give them a great life.
But I do realise that we've got to do everything we can to make sure that it's a rarity.
And you said 200 horses a year is a lot of horses and it is.
And it’s right that we should focus on what is a small percentage.
Yes. Every single one is regrettable.
And down in my yard, you'll see apple trees and benches in memory of these horses,
so you know, they're never forgotten.
We should register the lucky ones. And as a sport, we should show that.
And the ones that aren't so lucky?
We need to find out the ones that don't and do something about it. Absolutely.
I think everyone in racing agrees with that.
Click, click click click, walk on, good boy well done, good boy. Canter.
Does he get as dizzy as I do?
No - and I don’t get dizzy lunging him because I’m concentrating on him. Good lad, there.
Kate Sigsworth is a trustee of the Thoroughbred Breeders’ Association.
People probably find it quite hard to reconcile the idea
that you absolutely love these animals
with them dying on racecourses, and using the whip, and that sort of thing.
Racing is working to improve its image.
We're trying to open up and show people how they are looked after.
We live on planet Earth.
There's always going to be accidents and injuries,
and the worst injuries I’ve seen are actually horses in paddocks.
Kate looks after 25 horses at her small stud farm,
where foals are cared for before entering the industry.
This horse is one year old.
He still has his testicles on, which for racing is normal
at this time of their life.
He may get to keep his testicles?
If he's good enough.
The pressure's on.
They probably have a better quality of life if they're taken off.
Yeah?
Because testosterone - it makes them harder to deal with,
really the only thing they can do is go and cover
and they have to be very good to do that.
In 2020 there were only 138 breeding stallions in the UK,
but each one has the potential to cover,
or breed with, hundreds of mares.
Though the average breeding fee is between £10,000 and £25,000,
foals sired by the UK’s most expensive stallion cost a whopping £250,000.
He's in debt at the moment, essentially.
Ultimately they're expensive beasts and they're expensive to keep.
But the potential to earn a significant amount of money is there?
Yeah. And this is what keeps us all going. It's the dream.
Yeah.
It's the dream.
The racing dream is a lucrative one,
with a great deal of the sport’s income provided by gambling.
The grandson of a bookmaker himself,
I wanted to know why Dene was so against this funding model.
Without gambling, racing wouldn't exist.
Racing can't fund itself.
It needs to think out the box and think, well, if we’re gonna have this,
how do we fund it properly?
The gambling industry's taking money off people who are vulnerable in a lot of cases.
So it's exploiting the horses and it’s exploiting those that are watching what's going on,
and gambling.
Surely with that much money in the sport,
there is an opportunity for the pot to be spread out more equally
and for other horses who go by the wayside to be looked after into retirement.
That's the way it would be in an ideal world.
The vast majority of horses will never win a race, will never earn their keep costs, and as a result,
they will be kicked out and because there's so many horses bred,
they will be replaced.
And it's a numbers game.
Get enough horses, eventually you'll get a great horse.
There are certainly lots of horses.
In 2020 alone the UK racing industry registered 4,714 new foals.
So this is my youngest foal.
The brown foal’s male, he’s a colt.
How quickly will it become clear what his trajectory will be?
Well, genetically he’s bred to be very good.
The numbers are not necessarily stacked in their favour.
No, they aren't. But they would stand a better chance
than most foals at this stage of being winners.
Because they're bred purely for speed, this is why you get so many injuries.
Possibly. I mean, horses are very badly developed.
So two thirds of the weight naturally runs down the front legs.
The front leg has developed to be like us standing on that finger. So ...
Yeah.
They are going to be fragile, but across the board,
horses are generally looked after pretty well.
But every industry has its problems, whatever you’re doing with them.
And the biggest problem with horses,
according to charities, is not being put down early enough
when they're in incurable pain, disease, illness.
So it's a very fine balance.
Despite many former thoroughbreds going on to be rehomed
and repurposed well into retirement, some horses still slip through the cracks.
Every horse that turns up here does turn up with physical problems from racing.
So they may have back pain or pelvic pain
and various conditions that need veterinary intervention and physio,
and some of them need surgery.
Mary Frances runs Moorcroft Rehabilitation Centre,
a charity that takes in a new ex-racehorse every few weeks.
If they can sell the horse for £500,
they're probably not going to send it to Moorcroft.
So we will get the horses that they simply can't give away for free or sell.
There must be a mix in terms of how, their condition when they came in?
A complete mix.
Sadly, some of them do turn up very, very poor and they just need time
and they can be in quite a lot of pain. So ...
Would you ever euthanise?
We do sometimes have to euthanise after,
but we don't do that until we've spent a huge amount of money
with the vet and the physiotherapist.
We don't give up very easily.
So they might be here, maybe nine months to a year.
A year is a very long time.
It is.
For a horse that's in pain and perhaps not having a great quality of life.
But through that year, we will have relieved the pain.
If the pain keeps returning, then we have to face
that reality that the horse is too far gone with the injuries.
You cannot run a place like this, Richard, and not have to sometimes put horses down.
For those that do live into retirement, the industry invests an estimated
£1.4m each year.
Would you say enough money is being pumped into the lives of ex-racehorses by the industry?
I don't think enough money is being pumped
into the horses that are damaged and leave racing with injuries
and problems that need time and money spent on them.
Definitely not.
There is a pool of vulnerable horses being
created at the moment by them being sold to the wrong people
without the knowledge and experience to deal with them.
A lot of these horses don't really have a great future, potentially.
Well, I'd argue that they do, and a lot of progress has been made on this.
A racehorse can live for 25 years, yet many of them don't get anywhere near that age.
I don't know what the statistics are.
This is part of the problem.
Yeah. – A lot of the statistics aren't traceable.
What about the horses that are dying in training and that are dying when they leave the industry?
We don't know.
There needs to be a mechanism to find that out.
And I think the industry is really doing things about that.
Why has the industry been so slow to make some of these changes happen?
I wouldn’t say that they've been that slow at it,
I think it is something that we are now far more conscious of.
Put it like that. I think we accept that traceability is a big issue.
I think there's a genuine feel for getting this right
and improving it.
And why? Because the world is changing, there’s people asking questions.
But the more we express those opinions and talk about them and are open about them,
the more chance we have of coming up with answers
that will look as though we’re putting welfare first.
They do a good PR job and they hope the public gets that.
But the reality is actually that's not the case.
They will immediately slag us off and say, oh they only take two a month.
4,000 leave racing every year.
How much does Moorcroft have? A few hundred.
Well, where are the others then?
Exactly. That's the question.
Where are they?
Well, they get slaughtered, don't they?
It's all about money. If you've got this drive for money
or for that one horse is going to make you a million or whatever.
Then I'm sorry, but you missed so many other things.
Despite its riches and popularity, I did not get the sense that racing is a sport
that feels fully at ease with itself and how it is perceived.
Whilst this positive PR effort must be dwarfed by true commitment to welfare and traceability
for every single horse racing produces, the reality is that the pampered life of
a thoroughbred will always be at some risk, in the human pursuit of lucrative reward.