Splinter Groups Need to Get a Life, Jumps Horse Racing Australia.

I am sick of these splinter groups that cry foul all the time and then newspapers pick up their story and run with exaggerated headlines.

Today was one such time; I was reading the Herald Sun Newspaper from Melbourne in Australia and came across this headline, “Violent fall reignites calls for jumps racing ban.”

It is to do with horse racing, where horses run races and jump over hurdle or steeples.

As with any sport, actually every time we leave our house there is an element of danger involved. Things can go wrong and this means something or someone can be hurt.

In jumps racing, horses will fall at the hurdle or steeple and sometimes the outcome is the horse needs to be put down, euthanatized as many call it. And jockeys can be hurt and sadly but rarely a jockey will lose their life.

Australia a few years back had a minority get on a bandwagon and call for a ban on jumps racing. These small groups hollered and cried and of course for some reason people listen to them and at one time it looked like jumps racing would be gone. One such group called Horse Racing Kills has plenty of over the top, scare mongering plastered all over its website. Simply trying to shock people into believing them.

Thankfully this didn’t happen, the industry and powers to be put their heads together and used common sense. The left wingers cried foul but no-one listened.

These are the same people who call for duck shooting bans, stop the cull of kangaroos or koalas and on it goes. They complain everything is wrong and dangerous, or simply these people just have nothing better to do.

Look, everybody has a right to an opinion and view. That is freedom of speech, to say what we think and believe. I think these groups and people are full of shit.

If they call for bans on jumps racing because it is cruel and dangerous and other totally idiotic reasons, then let’s ban anything that might injure or harm an animal or human being.

Sadly a 21 year old man called Halley Appleby lost his life over the weekend playing rugby,a sport he loved. Something went wrong in a tackle and sadly he is now deceased. Do we stop all contact sports because of this death?

Motorbike and car racing, it kills people every now and then and is a waste of money and causes green house gases, should this be stopped.

All I am trying to say that there is a risk in everything we do each day. Horse racing is no different.

Horses are bred to run. They are bred to be pets, play sports like polocrosse (this is a real game not that limp wristed game called polo), for dressage and show jumping and of course racing.

If these horses were not racing they would be dead, they would be slaughtered like hundreds of thousands of other animals and made into pet meat at knackeries across the country.

And when you do the percentages of racehorse deaths, to the amount of runners and races held across the country, it is small. It is sad to see any animal be hurt, suffer or die. But they are doing something that is in their blood to do.

We humans do things everyday that could hurt, or even kill us. But does that mean we have to stop every activity that might be dangerous.

I just wish the media and journalists would stop dramatising all this, stop jumping on these bandwagons of small groups just to write a sensationalist headline in the hope a person will read their column. The media are trying to cause a furore and have their online comment boxes light up, as simple as that.

But they have the right to; it is a free country and freedom of speech. But thankfully there are many more normal people out there than the cranks, halfwits with their small agendas.

Brunty