Meta Osborne: The horse has no seat at the table

Cover image courtesy of Emma Berry

TTR’s problems-and-solutions series asks people inside racing to name the industry’s biggest problem, but only if they are also prepared to offer a solution.

Last week, we heard from Newgate Farm’s Henry Field. Shaped by the buying, selling, risk and long-term investment that sit beneath the sport, he argued that we must future-proof the industry by diversifying our revenue streams.

Our third response comes from Meta Osborne, equine reproduction vet, horse welfare advocate, and co-owner of successful Irish stud Tinnakill House.

What do you think is racing's biggest problem?

The horse has no one in the room whose job is to represent him.

Almost everyone I have met in this industry, in Ireland or in Australia, cares about horses more than they would ever say out loud. The problem is structural: when decisions get made, in the boardroom, the stewards' room, the sales ring, every person at the table is accountable to somebody else.

Trainers answer to owners, and administrators answer to a board. That board, in turn, answers to a levy and to government. The horse has no equivalent line of accountability, so his interests get folded into everyone else's and come out the other side as a compromise.

We all know what it feels like when we are challenged about horse welfare. Someone raises an eyebrow at the dinner table when you mention that you are involved in horseracing, (which is a more common experience now than it was 20 years ago), and we reach for one of two things: defensiveness “...racehorses are really well cared-for...” or deflection “...what about the Brumbies?...” Neither is an answer; both are simply what people say when they do not yet have better language.

The same instinct operates at industry level, with better production values. When racing is challenged on welfare, we reach for a rule tweak: a whip regulation, a ban for whoever got caught. These are real actions, and often good ones, but they share a quality. They are changes we can make by Friday.

They do not reach the level underneath: how we are governed, what we count, what we reward, and what we believe a horse is for.

Australia and Ireland are half a world apart, and our punters often do not recognise each other's slang, but the pressures are identical: funding, attendances, field sizes, foal crops.

Underneath all of it sits the one thing that feels like it should not be named: the welfare of the animals without whom racing would be just another human sporting construct, like tennis or football. The horse is also the one voice in racing we have never built a way to hear.

What is the solution?

Start by recognising that not every welfare intervention carries the same weight, and stop treating a rule change and a governance change as if they belong to the same category.

There is a body of work from systems thinking, originally developed by Donella Meadows for tricky, complex problems like healthcare, education and climate policy, that explains why change so often fails. Her key insight is that an industry (system) can be changed at different depths. Shallow interventions are easy to implement but weak in effect: adjust a limit, tighten a number.

Deep interventions are harder, sometimes uncomfortable, but they are the ones that actually shift behaviour, because they change what people believe success looks like rather than what they are permitted to do.

Racing spends almost all its welfare energy at the shallow end. That has less to do with cynicism than with what sits within easy reach.

Dr Karen Luke from Melbourne led the work adapting Meadows' framework for horse sport which was recently published in the Journal of Applied Animal Welfare Science, and I was part of the team. We call it the Horse Welfare 12: twelve places where you can intervene in a horse industry, ranked by depth, from adjusting the numbers at one end to changing our mental model of what a horse is at the other.

It is a diagnostic and a set of problem-solving tools that are not new; they have been used for decades on problems far harder than ours. What is new is pointing them at horses.

You take what your organisation is already doing on welfare and find out how deep it actually goes. Most people assume their programme is broad. What the HW12 tends to reveal is that it is shallow, with a great deal of activity clustered at the end that changes the least.

We ran the first proof-of-concept workshop at Naas Racecourse in June. Forty-one people attended: senior administrators, trainers, grooms, vets and animal welfare advocates, from across Ireland and the UK. Some arrived visibly nervous. A room containing both racing people and welfare advocates is not most people's idea of a good day out.

Rather than debate, we worked through hypothetical scenarios, asking what actually happens and why it keeps happening, and let people map their own industry. At one point we assigned everyone a role that was not their usual one and asked them to form a committee. Some people were given the role of the horse and were not allowed to speak or vote. Afterwards, they were the ones who most wanted to talk about it.

Sitting at a table while decisions are made about you, with no way to object, turns out to be a different kind of education.

What struck me most was that nobody in that room needed convincing that welfare matters. What they needed was a way to talk about it that was not an accusation. A diagnostic provides that. It turns the conversation into a technical one rather than a moral one, and a technical conversation is something this industry is genuinely good at having.

Here is what I would put to Australian racing.

Take one Principal Racing Authority. Racing Victoria would be the obvious candidate, given the scrutiny it already deals with. Run the HW12 across its existing welfare programme, to map where the effort is actually concentrated.

Then take on the harder task. Pick one intervention from the deep end of that map. The mechanism I’d argue for is welfare indicators that reach the board at every board meeting rather than just appearing in the annual report — so somebody at the table is finally obliged to answer for the horse.

It also matters what gets counted in the first place. Fallers and fatality rates are the numbers we reach for, and they measure the horse the way we measure a machine, in terms of how often he fails.

The alternative is to count the things that describe a life: how long careers last, how many horses leave racing sound, what happens to them afterward, and how many are still alive five years after their last start. And even here, with simple concepts like the idea of soundness, we need to stop and pause. By definition we tend to mean ‘sound enough to race’, but that is a definition written inside the beliefs (our mental models) that we are trying to examine.

Measurements like the ones I’ve mentioned are harder to collect, and that difficulty is instructive: the metrics we find inconvenient are usually the ones closely intertwined with the beliefs we have not examined.

Give the initiative an owner, and a working group with a 12 month timeline.

This is a lens, and it has limits. It shows where the effort in a welfare programme is concentrated but it does not guarantee outcomes, and I would be wary of anyone who claimed otherwise.

Every racing jurisdiction in the world is currently being asked the welfare question, and most are answering it with tweaks to different numbers. The first one to answer with a mechanism, to be able to say here is who speaks for the horse and here is what happens when they do, will not just be ahead on welfare. It will be the one whose people have a real answer the next time someone raises an eyebrow at the dinner table.

So we put the question back to the industry: would you like to see this methodology applied to our welfare systems, and where do we start?

Email your thoughts to vicky@ttrausnz.com.au.