Horses Die at Aintree Races

"Death came again to the Grand National yesterday...as two horses died in appalling falls.

There were four deaths at the three-day meeting last year, five in 2009 and since 2000 a staggering 33 horses have died at the Aintree spring festival..."

Source: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/racing/article-1375310/Grand-National-2011-Aintree-day-horror-millions-2-horses-die.html?ITO=1490

What a disgraceful waste of beautiful, feeling animals. Have a race by all means - horses like to run - but why does this particular race insist on installing these awful fences with pits, sometimes filled with water, hidden behind them? The pro lobby point out, truthfully it seems, that it brings in big money. Money to see death? How pathetic. And very ugly, even.

Comments

Anonymous said…

The racecoruse was sold out for the first time in its history too.
I will hold my hand up and admit I have on occassion enjoyed watching showjumping, but there the horse has a choice if it doesn't want to jump then the jockey tends to end up doing the jump by themselves. At a steeplechase like the National there is no choice for the horse as there are so many other horses right behind them. Unless, of course, you are the horse at the back, then the man on your back beats you with a stick to make you go faster.

It would appear that LiveJournal cannot verify my credentials even though LiveJournal has allowed me onto my own page so I'll just have to be anon! H.

10 April 2011 at 13:14

Adele Cosgrove-Bray said…

Hmm, not very anonymous!

I don't mind the race itself, but the jumps with pits/troughs behind are needlessly cruel. Also the horses themselves are so young now, too young for their knee and hip joints to have matured and strenghened. This apparently makes them faster than an older horse but more liable to injury.

17 April 2011 at 17:58

A Cure for Aging?

"All that we profess to do is but this, - to find out the secrets of the human frame; to know why the parts ossify and the blood stagnates, and to apply continual preventatives to the effort of time. This is not magic; it is the art of medicine rightly understood. In our order we hold most noble -, first, that knowledge which elevates the intellect; secondly, that which preserves the body. But the mere art (extracted from the juices and simples) which recruits the animal vigour and arrests the progress of decay, or that more noble secret which I will only hint to thee at present, by which heat or calorific, as ye call it, being, as Heraclitus wisely taught, the primordial principle of life, can be made its perpectual renovator...." Zanoni, book IV, chapter II, by Edward Bulwer-Lytton, first published in 1842. Oroboros keyring - Spooky Cute Designs The idea of being able to achieve an immortal life is probably as old as human life itself. Folklore and myt...

Remembering Richie Tattoo Artist's Studio

Richard in the street entrance to his tattoo studio in Liverpool. The vertical sign next to Richard is now in the Liverpool Tattoo Museum. Yesterday, my sister Evelyn, Richard and myself stood outside Richard's old tattoo studio and looked up at the few remaining signs, whose paint has now mostly flacked away to reveal bare wood. On the studio's window are stick-on letters which read, "Art", where once it boldly announced his presence as the city's only "Tattoo Artist". I can remember him buying that simple plastic lettering from an old-fashioned printer's shop. This was in 1993, not long after he'd opened the studio and before he could afford better signs. After he'd patiently stuck them onto the glass we realised that from the outside the sign read "Artist Tattoo", so we had to carefully peel the letters off the window and have another go, laughing over having made such an obvious error yet worried in case we spoiled the letteri...

Dear Diary...

Do you keep a diary? Why did you start it, and, if you started one then stopped, why was that? What sort of things do (or did) you write about? I ask as, as a long-time diarist myself, there is an interesting piece in The Guardian today which talks about one woman's diary habit, which she began at the age of fourteen. I started a diary around that age too, but destroyed it after my mother accused me of using cocaine. A stern scene followed, with both parents perched ram-rod straight in their armchairs, while I was subjected to a heated inquisition. Where had I bought it, and who from? Didn't I know such things led to death and doom? I struggled to decipher their bewildering accusations, until Mum blurted out, "I read it in your diary!" To find my diary, Mum would first have had to rummage through my dressing table, obviously when I wasn't around to protest. Her intrusion on my privacy was assumed by both parents to be acceptable, and now, with this handwritten c...

Search This Blog