Andrew Rule: Childishly ignorant people are warping the animal welfare debate

AS the urban majority in mega-cities like ours become marooned from real life — life as it has been for thousands of years — formerly intelligent and informed people are revealed as childishly ignorant, even delusional, about our relationship with animals, writes Andrew Rule.

NO sane person likes to see pain inflicted on an animal. That’s not strange. What is strange is that so many of us are more concerned about perceived cruelty to animals than about very real cruelty to fellow humans.

Imagine the outcry if there was a fad for inserting metal studs in pets’ tongues in exactly the same way thousands of people have their tongues, ears, noses and other body parts pierced in tattoo parlours. In people, we shrug it off as fashion.

Hundreds of girls and women in Australia suffer genital mutilation because of an accident of birth: they were born into the religious culture that has mutilated roughly 200 million females around the world.

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But, as with arranged marriages, enforced polygamy and trading under-age girls as sex slaves, we shrug it off as religion.

One genital mutilation is a crime but 200 million is a statistic and so the western media mostly look the other way, even when such things happen in our own suburbs.

They prefer smaller, softer targets.

It’s a long way from the gravity of those very real crimes against humanity to the way Australia treat animals, but domestic animal stories are easy meat.

The latest arrived on the ABC current affairs flagship Four Corners during the week, dressed as a penetrating look at the racing industry. It wasn’t.

It mostly rehashed the Aquanita doping scandal, the story the Herald Sun broke many months ago.

Four Corners staged re-enactments of stablehand Greg Nelligan getting sprung squirting bicarbonate paste down a horse’s throat in a swabbing stall at Flemington last October.

In real life, this happened while the champion Winx was winning the Turnbull Stakes.

There, in a few crowded minutes, was the best and worst of racing — serial cheats hiding their actions behind one of the finest performances of the world’s best racehorse.

By the time Winx hit the front, the manure had hit the fan: the stewards had Nelligan and his mobile phone and the tube of paste.

Leading Caulfield trainer Robert Smerdon’s long career was all over bar the shouting and several others were in jeopardy.

Four Corners recently rehashed the Aquanita doping scandal, as story the Herald Sun broke many months ago.

Four Corners went over this again in set-piece interviews with racing chiefs who sternly took block against the obvious questions. But it underlined the odd fact that stewards had let Smerdon keep his mobile telephone despite taking the “catspaw” Greg Nelligan’s.

Not that it mattered: Nelligan’s phone contained thousands of text messages going back to 2010, most of them to and from Smerdon. With phones, it only takes one to tango.

Picking over Aquanita’s corpse wasn’t enough to fill a program, so the producers cobbled together other random racing problems, perceived and real.

A side issue promoted to fill the gap was aired by some battling bush trainers who Aren’t Happy Jan because other trainers come to small country meetings and win races.

While it’s true they feel aggrieved, it’s not true they have a legitimate grievance.

Owners of horses in one stable have the same right to try to win races as owners in another. It’s called horse racing. You don’t get penalised for winning.

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Meanwhile, the program and its battlers missed a legitimate beef: the fact small country training centres are under threat from “rationalisation” of racecourses and a push to herd racing into a few big centres.

As a wise racing person (not one interviewed by Four Corners) says: “If the puddles dry up the frogs disappear”. But that’s a story for another day.

The other issue roped into the grab-bag report is “wastage”, the Orwellian word for what happens to the large number of horses that cannot beat the slightly faster, or slightly tougher, horses that might win or run places.

Common sense — admittedly not that common — tells you that no matter how “good” an athlete is, if there is any that are better, the merely good one doesn’t win and won’t be at the local school sports or the Olympics or whatever. It’s exactly the same with horses.

It might surprise animal libbers and Greens and “doctors’ wives” that winners win by beating others. Among the others are those that consistently run well behind the leaders. A consistent loser cannot even get to race within easy reach because of the number of other horses that better deserve to get a run.

Sport. BCM. 6/6/05. Generic racehorse pics re: racing inquiry. picDavidKelly.

So what happens to the also-rans? The answer is that some — even many — are rehomed, much like “rescue dogs” from the dogs’ home. And some end up as food for those same dogs, which apparently can’t survive on cabbages and beans.

Because the truth is (as with dogs and cats) there is not going to be a new home for every retired or unwanted or injured horse.

The number of homes is finite, and undoubtedly exceeded by the number of horses that are surplus, remembering that most “rescue” horses successfully placed in the Off The Track programs will last up to 15 years or more, so the turnover is not huge. Another truth is that any that don’t work out are going to be moved on.

And everyone from the overly-defensive racing industry to the most overly-rabid animal rights activists should face a simple fact: like all other domestic animals, horses that are old or unsound or untrainable or unsafe or just unwanted have one right, and that is a humane death. The humane death that decent people want for every creature we raise to eat or work or treat as pets, from pigs to ponies to poodles.

But as the urban majority in mega-cities like ours become marooned from real life — life as it has been for thousands of years — apparently intelligent and informed people are revealed as childishly ignorant, even delusional, about our relationship with animals.

I met a nice woman recently who confessed taking an old hen to the vet to be euthanised by a puzzled professional who charged her $60 and asked, “Why don’t you do this at home for nothing?”

On the way home, the woman with enough money to indulge her own squeamishness probably stopped at her favourite free-range butcher and bought an “organic” chicken that had been slaughtered just like the other million killed that day. Go figure.

These are the sorts of adult children — and there are many of them — who warp the debate about racing and other animal welfare issues.

They seem to think all animals one day get to die of old age in retirement homes listening to whale songs.

The fact that so many people share the same delusions does not make them right. But it often gets them an airing on our ABC.