Did you watch the Grand National on Saturday? It doesn't quite have the overwhelming appeal of the Melbourne Cup, 'the race that stops a nation', but it still draws a huge television audience. If you did watch it you will have spotted that the field was directed to miss out two fences on account of the dead horses lying on the landing side. If you were listening rather than watching, however, you wouldn't have known about it as the Beeb decided to censor its transmission and simply omit an reference to it.
How and why does a broadcaster decide that its audience is too squeamish to be allowed to see dead horses? Does it believe that people are unaware of the fact that horses get killed when racing? Why doesn't it tackle the issue head on?
The case against jump racing is an easy one to make, plucking on the heart-strings of the average Brit's love of animals. However, like most seemingly easy issues, this one gets a bit more complicated if you delve beneath the surface.
According to Horse Death Watch, on average around 170 horses have died on the track in each of the past four years. Shocking? Yes and no.
Cliche warning: the death of every horse whilst racing is very sad. Now that's out of the way let's present some counter arguments. Without racing there would be many fewer horses - that's a fact as the breeding industry exists to provide horses for racing and other even more dangerous equine pursuits such as cross-country eventing. Those horses, whilst in training, are amongst the most cossetted animals around: fed well, exercised regularly, and getting the best of veterinary attention. That veterinary care extends to keeping horses alive in circumstances where many owners would simply have the animal put down - if a horse needs 12 months of rest, how many domestic owners have the time, patience and funds to do that?
Next time you're driving through the countryside, have a look at the horses in the fields, and think about the lives that they lead. If you were a horse would you like to spend the winters outside with just a rug to keep you warm, seeing your owner for 20 minutes a day when they bring you feed, and living a solitary life, or would you rather be in a heated box at night, riden out every day, fed the ideal diet, and with a vet on hand should you have a problem? Or, if there were no equine sports, simply dead?
There are scandals to be investigated in terms of horse welfare, but racing comes a long way down the list. Try these. What happens to horses when their owners tire of them? Have you seen the horse butcher's shops in continental Europe, and have you ever wondered about the conditions those horses endure on the way to the slaughterhouse? When the temperature gets to -10C in mid-winter, what happens to some of the horses out in British fields?
The real scandal is not the sad fact of a couple of horses dying at Aintree. Charities such as World Horse Welfare are at the forefront of the fight to improve the lot of the working horse and it's worth a look at the work they do. I once did a book review for the long-departed Sporting Life in which I used the phrase 'down among the meat-men' highlighting that when a horse is sold below a certain price, it's likely that it's being sold as horse-meat - you won't be surprised that my review was printed intact, except for the paragraph on that issue. This is racing and eventing's equivalent of Lord Alfred Douglas's 'love that dare not speak its name'.
Finally, and you might have missed it with the tabloids making a fuss about the deaths of Ornais and Dooney's Gate on Saturday, jockey Peter Toole continues to fight for his life in a Liverpool hospital after being critically injured in a fall in an earlier Aintree race.
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