Forcing horses to jump during races is to end in South Australia, the animal welfare organization Coalition for the Protection of Racehorses (CPR) said in a press release.
“This is a huge win for the horses, who will no longer be forced to jump obstacles at high speeds with a whip-wielding jockey on their back,” CPR said, who worked with Animal Liberation South Australia (ALSA) to protest horse racing.
“Whilst we celebrate this fantastic news, we must also remember the many individual horses who have suffered horrific injuries and lost their lives due to this brutal and archaic so-called “sport”,” CPR added.
The Australian state of Victoria is now the only state left allowing horse races that involve jumping, according to CPR.
Campaign director for CPR, Elio Celotto, said the news would “place Racing Victoria under greater pressure to do the same because blatant animal cruelty is no longer acceptable.”
“At the end of the day, seeing horses regularly fall over jumps, injured and killed on a regular basis is not a sport, it’s blatant animal cruelty,” Sally Sutton, spokesperson for ALSA, said.
She added that after more than 20 years “of watching jumps racing play Russian Roulette with the lives of horses, we are excited to finally be able to say the sport is now officially dead in [South Australia].”
“Years and years of statistics have repeatedly shown that despite the implementation of numerous safety changes, jumps racing cannot be made safe, and as we have always claimed, the only way to make jumps racing safe is to get rid of it,” Sutton said.
In November, CPR organizes a series of Nup to the Cup protests aimed at ending Australia’s most famous horse race, the Melbourne Cup in the state of Victoria.
Neither the Australian Jumping Racing Association nor Racing Australia made any immediate response to requests for comment by The Animal Reader.
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