Are horse racing, riding and circuses cruel to animals?

The objection

“A well-treated horse loves to run, and a working animal that’s cared for is happy. There’s nothing cruel about riding, racing or a well-run show, the animals enjoy it.”

The answer

A loved horse on a quiet ride, or any animal that is genuinely well kept, can have a real relationship with the people around it, and the harm across riding, racing, circuses and zoos varies enough that each has to be judged on its own record. What they share is that the animal is used for our pleasure and had no say in it. In racing and shows, its enjoyment is vouched for by the people who profit from its performance, so “he loves to race” comes with a financial motive attached, and a horse that loves to run still didn’t choose the fences or the risk that comes with them.

How many horses die in racing?

In Britain, 192 horses were fatally injured on raceday or within 48 hours of it in 2025, out of 86,281 runners, according to figures published by the sport’s own bodies, including the British Horseracing Authority [1]. Most of them died in jump racing, which lost 133 horses from 28,116 runners, one in 211, against 59 from 58,176 runners on the flat [1]. The sport says deaths in training are not yet fully captured [1], and Animal Aid, a campaign group that records each death on a British racecourse, had logged 3,262 deaths between March 2007 and late October 2026 [2]. In the United States, flat racing lost 1.07 horses per 1,000 starts in 2025, counting deaths up to 72 hours after a race, according to the Jockey Club’s Equine Injury Database, an industry record that leaves out jump races [3]. That is close to Britain’s rate on the flat, and 47% lower than when the database first published figures in 2009 [3].

What happens to racehorses after racing?

Most horses leaving British racing retire, go to stud or are sold abroad, but the sport cannot yet trace them all. Of about 7,000 marked as leaving training each year, it estimates that 2,000 are resting or recovering and may race again, 2,500 retire for good and 2,500 go to breeding or are sold overseas [1]. Combining its 2023 Thoroughbred Census with other records, the sport says it now has information on about 80% of an estimated 33,600 former racehorses living in Britain, which leaves about one in five untraced (British Horseracing Authority, 2024) [4]. Since January 2022 every horse that runs in Britain has had to be signed out of the human food chain, and the sport says three British-trained horses that had raced since then were killed at an abattoir in 2024 [1]. Counting older horses too, 22 thoroughbreds last trained in Britain were killed at a British abattoir that year [1].

In Ireland, RTÉ Investigates (2024) found that 71% of the 2,400 horses slaughtered at Shannonside Foods between 1 January 2023 and 1 March 2024 were thoroughbreds bred for racing, and more than 400 of them had raced [5]. Its undercover filming, in a building Shannonside used to pre-screen horses before slaughter, caught one of the company’s animal welfare officers inserting false identification microchips [5], and the abuses it showed included the ill-treatment of dying horses and horses being whipped and struck with lengths of plastic piping (Irish Times, 2024) [6]. Shannonside Foods said it rejected the claims [5], and within a week of the broadcast the Department of Agriculture had suspended the plant’s operations [6].

Is horse riding cruel?

Riding itself needn’t harm a horse, but competition often leaves injuries in the mouth around the bit, mostly out of sight. When Finnish researchers examined 208 event horses after the cross-country phase, 52% had fresh lesions in the bit area and 4% had severe ones (Tuomola et al., 2021) [7]. The rate was higher in harness racing, where the horse is driven: of 261 Finnish trotters checked after a race, 84% had fresh lesions in the bit area, although only 2% showed blood outside the mouth (Tuomola et al., 2019) [8]. A Danish check of 3,143 horse-and-rider combinations at competitions, where federation rules ruled out a full look inside the mouth, found lesions or blood at the corners of the lips in 9.2% of horses, with no difference between bit types or bitless bridles and less risk under looser nosebands (Uldahl & Clayton, 2019) [9].

Are wildlife tourist attractions cruel to animals?

Most kinds of wildlife tourist attraction harm the animals in them, by the measure of a 2015 Oxford study funded by the campaign group World Animal Protection, which scored 24 types visited by 3.6 to 6 million tourists a year: 18 had a negative effect on welfare, involving 230,000 to 550,000 animals (Moorhouse et al., 2015) [10]. All four kinds of street performance it scored, among them dancing bears and snake charming, came out negative for welfare [10]. Audience enjoyment proved a poor guide, since only 7.8% of the TripAdvisor feedback on these attractions was negative on welfare or conservation grounds [10]. Travelling circuses can no longer use wild animals anywhere in Britain: Scotland banned them from 28 May 2018, England from 20 January 2020 under the Wild Animals in Circuses Act 2019 [11], and Wales from 1 December 2020 under its own Act [12].