This programme contains scenes from the start
which viewers may find upsetting.
This programme contains scenes from the start
which viewers may find upsetting.
A Grand National-winning trainer shamed after being pictured
sitting on a dead horse.
The prominent trainer Gordon Elliott has been
temporarily banned from racing.
It was an image that shocked the horse racing world.
What concerned me was not particularly Gordon Elliott
being an idiot, but the fact there's a dead young horse below him.
Tonight, we investigate what happens to racehorses
when their careers end.
Sadly, so many of them come to us with injuries and ailments
that need time and need, without a doubt, a large
amount of funding.
The fate of some of the thousands of young horses dying in the UK
and Ireland every year.
Oh my god, what a gorgeous horse.
Oh, no.
What he about to do?
And we reveal how horses once trained by some of the biggest
names in the industry, have ended up here...
...in an abattoir...
...where they're slaughtered.
There are a number of animals that have not been killed well.
If that's representative of how they're being killed, then we've got
a really serious problem.
I come from horse country - County Kildare in Ireland.
Growing up here, I know how much both the British and Irish
love their racehorses.
Many of the animals trained here go on to the biggest stages in racing.
The defining stage.
300 years in the making.
This is the glamorous image racing likes to portray.
It's a £5-billion industry in the UK and Ireland.
Some of the most successful horses in racing are trained
at the Cullentra Stables in County Meath, promoted
here by now disgraced trainer Gordon Elliott.
The dead horse he was pictured sitting on was
a seven-year-old called Morgan.
He says it died of an apparent heart attack on the gallops.
Gordon Elliott was suspended from the sport and widely condemned.
Now he says his world is crumbling in front of him.
Shocking I think is probably the first emotion that came to mind.
The fear is years of hard work have been undermined.
Gordon Elliott apologised and said "the welfare of each and every
horse" under his care is paramount and has been "central
to his success."
But campaign group Animal Aid, which is calling for an end to horse
racing, says the picture raises serious questions for
the whole industry.
What concerned me was not particularly Gordon Elliott
being an idiot, but the fact there's a dead young horse below him.
What were the reasons for that horse dying in training?
How many horses are dying in training?
The horse was owned by Ryanair boss Michael O'Leary's stud farm.
Its partnership with Gordon Elliott has been one of the most
successful in racing history, culminating in Michael O'Leary's
dream of winning the Grand National.
I went into my first bookie shop to put a bet on the Grand National
without my mother knowing.
To win it...
...is a dream come true.
One of the biggest names in jump racing, Michael O'Leary, is now
winding down his racing empire.
His horses are looked after by a variety of trainers.
Since 2015, of the 500 horses owned by his stud 86 have died.
That's more than one in six.
Is that a death rate that's inevitable for jump horses
with tough racing careers?
Dr Hannah Donovan is a veterinary expert.
No.
Where we have the veterinary care we have, and the developments
we have, to be able to look after horses in the high
standard that we have in Britain and in Ireland,
then, no, you wouldn't expect that.
Michael O'Leary says the horses that died suffered serious
or life-threatening injuries either in training or on the racecourse -
so rehab was not an option.
"These animals were humanely euthanised" on veterinary advice,
"rather than allowing them to suffer".
Many animals live long and happy lives when they leave racing.
So, what are the rules when a horse's racing career ends?
Daniel Mills is a Professor of Equine Behaviour.
The industry's own regulations recommend that you should make
provision for all the animals that you're responsible for.
According to the guidelines, the onus is on trainers and owners
to find lifelong care for their horses.
And that duty of care extends to racehorses forced to stop
racing due to injury.
Euthanasia is not ruled out, but should only be used,
on a vet's advice, to prevent a horse from suffering.
Does a career-ending injury necessarily mean that the horse
should be euthanased?
No, it doesn't.
It completely depends on the individual injury and situation.
And some horses, if they have an injury, you can put time
and often money into them to help rehabilitate them, heal
whatever has gone wrong.
This is an ex-racehorse who is receiving some treatment from
Kate, our full-time physiotherapist.
Mary Frances runs the Moorcroft Equine Rehabilitation Centre.
She's nursed injured racehorses back to health.
So he has arrived with some back pain and he's been with us
a while and he's receiving just further treatment.
He is in work now and he is much more comfortable that he was.
Around 7,000 horses leave British racing each year.
Mary says she's inundated with requests to help injured
racehorses like Lord Kennedy here.
The phone rings here every day and I get two or three requests
per day to take in an ex-racehorse.
They're signed over to the charity, and we take full
responsibility for them.
And that's a big commitment financially and otherwise.
We're having to beg, steal and borrow funding from other areas.
And we do very much worry for the future.
The British racing industry gives £1.4 million a year
for the aftercare of racehorses.
Mary thinks there's more that could be done.
Sadly, so many of them come to us with injuries and ailments
that need time and need, without a doubt, a large
amount of funding.
There's no question there is money available, it's not a poor industry,
there is money available, but there doesn't seem to be
the understanding or the desire to put the money where it is needed.
The British Horse Racing Authority says...
"The number of racehorses at rehoming centres is a relatively
small proportion of those retired from racing."
It says...
More than 300 British and Irish horses died at the racecourse
in the last full year of racing.
The British Horseracing Authority says horse racing is getting safer.
But away from the track, it's not easy to find out
what happens to racehorses when their careers end.
Scouring publicly available information and putting
the pieces together, I've discovered that
thousands of racehorses, often young, die every year.
Campaign group Animal Aid has been investigating
racehorse deaths for years.
It thinks it's found out what happens to some of them.
It set up covert cameras at an abattoir - Drury and Sons -
one of the few licensed to slaughter horses in England.
We wanted to see what was going to, what was actually happening there.
What were the type of horses going through?
What were the ages of these horses?
When we looked at the footage we were absolutely astounded
at the sheer volume of young thoroughbreds.
The footage was shot on four clays at the end of 2019 and early 2020.
Many of the horses seen being slaughtered were aged
between two and ten.
Much of the footage is too distressing to show.
Sort of two, three, four years old, you know, very, very
young, immature animals.
They weren't mature animals.
How long would they live normally?
A thoroughbred could live for 25, even 30 years.
So they've got a long life ahead of them, potentially.
Yet it's being cut short very early.
There's something fundamentally wrong here.
Some horses were beautiful, fabulous looking horses.
And we were saying, "Why are these horses going to slaughter?"
I show the footage to independent experts, Dr Hannah Donovan...
That horse is terrified.
...and Professor Daniel Mills.
Euthanasia means a good death.
And what I've seen this afternoon has been quite a lot of animals that
I'm concerned have not been killed well.
Some of these look really beautiful horses.
You know, it surprises me that nothing can be
done for these horses.
I would have thought some of these, you know, they looked
like they could be rehabilitated and sold on.
The vast majority of horses being slaughtered in Britain
and Ireland come from Irish owners and trainers, and the overall
figure is staggering.
From the start of 2019 to the end of 2020 alone,
4,000 racehorses were slaughtered in UK and Irish abattoirs.
It's not hard to construct an argument that the routine
slaughter of thousands of race horses brings shame
on the racing industry.
One thing is certain, it's not something racing boasts about.
While the covert cameras were recording at Drury's abattoir,
this horse turned up.
According to its documents, it's a racehorse called Tammys Hill.
Thousands watched as he raced in the Irish Grand National in 2015.
Tammys Hill is in contention, but at the fourth from last fence,
he rears up, with a leg injury.
We see him struggling in the background.
He was put down - his death widely reported.
So how come, almost five years later, he seems
to have turned up here?
The answer may lie in the international
horse meat industry.
Although not popular in the UK, there is a sizeable export market
for horse meat in Europe.
To make sure humans don't eat horse meat contaminated with veterinary
drugs like the anti-inflammatory bute, every horse must have
a microchip and matching passport.
Passports for horses are really important,
because medication they've ever had should be listed in their passport.
If any horse has ever had bute, they can't go
into the human food chain.
Residues can cause problems in humans later down the line,
causing an issue with humans' blood.
But there have been criminal attempts to sell horse meat unfit
for human consumption, using bogus documents.
The passport and microchip of every horse entering an abattoir should be
checked on site by a vet, seen here wearing green,
working for the Food Standards Agency or FSA,
to ensure correct identification.
Good morning.
Ingrid Kragl is an expert in food fraud.
So what do the fraudsters do to trick the system?
If you have a horse that is unfit for consumption,
but you want to sell it anyway to make as much money as you can,
you need to get around the rules.
And for doing that, there is quite a simple way to do it is you need
to falsify the passport.
Fraudulently introducing this horse into the food chain can bring
in a considerable amount of money.
So does this explain why a horse going by the name
of Tammy's Hill has turned up?
Tammys Hill did die at the Irish Grand National.
His owners told us they followed all the correct procedures and don't
know what happened next.
But Tammys Hill's microchip has turned up in the neck of this
horse - an imposter.
Was it to cover up that the horse had been given bute?
The FSA vet discovered the horse had two microchips.
One belonging to Tammy's Hill, and one to another horse.
It was stopped from being sold for food.
But this wasn't the only time a horse turned up at Drury's
with bogus paperwork.
We've obtained these confidential documents,
and in here there is evidence that over 20 clays there were at least 40
attempts to get horse meat into the human food chain
with dubious documentation.
These attempts were all spotted by the FSA vet.
The abattoir says "horses that are not compliant with current
regulations are rejected and do not enter the human food chain".
But it's critical of the passport system, and says it "does not
support the production of safe meat".
The FSA says, together with government, it's working
with the industry to review the equine passport system.
When a horse is slaughtered, there are strict rules designed
to limit its suffering.
Back with Drury and Sons, covertly recorded footage
raises other issues.
Lame or injured horses shouldn't be transported
to slaughter if it's likely to cause unnecessary suffering.
Drury's should know this.
They were fined thousands of pounds after transporting a lame horse
from Northern Ireland for slaughter in 2018.
The covert footage filmed a year later reveals a severely lame horse
at a farm owned by Drury's.
That horse was non-weight-bearing, so could not put the left
hind leg down at all, which indicates or suggests a very
severe injury or pain.
This horse is suffering, and this horse either needs
immediate pain relief intravenously or to consider euthanasia definitely
on the yard at the site.
The footage appears to show the horse remained in that condition
for at least a week.
And it seems the welfare issues don't stop there.
The scenes are so upsetting we can't show most of them.
So we've got two horses that have come in together into the room,
which seems quite unusual.
The regulations are that an animal should not be slaughtered
in sight of another.
A gunshot going off is going to be startling, seeing another
horse suddenly drop.
Is he not about to do them?
Oh, no.
Horses do respond very much to the behaviour
of other horses around them.
We see this clear breach of the rules 26 times.
But even more concerning - the cameras reveal how the kill
is sometimes far from instant.
When you slaughter a horse, what you're looking to do is get
the bullet so that it destroys the brain stem, which is where
the consciousnesses is and kills...
Stops the heart and the breathing as well.
You've got to get the angle right in order to hit
that bit of the brain.
And the easiest way to do it is to be right up close and then
you get the angle quite right.
Here the slaughterman shoots the horses from across the room.
While the covert cameras were filming, 91 horses
were shot from a distance.
On this occasion, it doesn't look like the shot has been accurate.
It doesn't look like the horse is even stunned.
I mean certainly the bullet has not been effective.
You can see it's turning its head.
It seems to have got some control actually over its head and neck.
The first few seconds, it looks like a horse is still conscious.
Taking a shot from a distance at a horse, to me, that's
completely out of order.
If you're going to euthanize a horse, you've got to get
a bullet in the right place.
And, you know, shooting a horse from afar as if you're on safari
is not the way to do it.
If that's representative of how they're being killed, then we've got
a really serious problem.
The abattoir says it takes "great care to maintain high welfare
conditions" and does not accept any form of animal abuse.
It says, where issues arise, it takes "swift action
to review and rectify" them.
"All horses are humanely destroyed" under the control of FSA vets
who are present on the slaughter line at all times.
So, should the FSA be intervening?
I think also what's shocking there is it looks
like there's an official veterinary surgeon in place as well.
And they have a responsibility as well to ensure
that the law is upheld.
The Food Standards Agency says it works closely with slaughterhouses
to "ensure animal welfare is maintained at all stages
of food production".
The Government is currently looking at what can be done
to improve enforcement and control at slaughterhouses.
Across four clays, we see 261 horses, ponies and thoroughbreds
killed at the abattoir.
Some of the racehorses who faced the slaughterman's gun
had illustrious pasts.
A number had been under the recent care of some of the most
respected names in the sport.
This video showcases Cheltenham Champion Hurdle-winning
trainer Gavin Cromwell's facilities.
He's on the Board of the Irish Racehorse Trainers Association.
And this is Beneficial Quest.
He'd been trained by Mr Cromwell.
Here he is being led to the kill room.
We asked Mr Cromwell if he was still the horse's trainer
at the time and knew about its slaughter.
He told us he didn't want to answer our questions.
Remember Gordon Elliott?
The prize-winning trainer suspended for sitting on a dead horse.
He's trained more than 1,300 horses.
He says the animals in his possession are treated
appropriately, he operates at all times under the advice
of veterinary surgeons and that he has rehomed
a substantial number of horses.
Well, you're about to see what happened to three horses that
had recently been trained at his yard.
High Expectations won £43,000 in prize money while racing.
High Expectations for Gordon Elliott winning this lucrative prize.
Vyta Du Roc was even more successful.
Earning his owners
more than £170,000 at courses like Cheltenham and Ascot.
And this is Kiss Me Kayf, who gamely struggled in the few
races she was entered in.
But it was when these horses developed career-ending injuries
that things started to go badly wrong for them.
Gordon Elliott says, in line with the owners' wishes,
he gave Vyta Du Roc to another rider and High Expectations
and Kiss Me Kayf to a horse dealer with an instruction to either rehome
or, if not possible, humanely euthanise them in line
with the regulations.
But we've discovered all three would eventually end up
on a lorry bound for England.
Despite being injured, including one with lameness,
the horses were taken by ferry across the Irish Sea
and driven to South West England.
There were 13 more horses from elsewhere also on the lorry.
If you have a lame horse or a lame animal at all,
they shouldn't be transported.
The pain and discomfort that they are feeling at the time
will only, will definitely be exacerbated by travelling them,
especially long journeys like that.
The horses were then unloaded and put in a barn
on Drury and Sons' farm.
They're kept somewhere which is completely alien to them.
This is going to be a very stressful situation.
A week later, they were back on the lorry being driven the final
journey to Drury's abattoir, where they were held overnight
before being led into the kill room.
This is Vyta Du Roc.
What a gorgeous horse.
Oh, my God, what a gorgeous horse.
And this is Kiss Me Kayf.
Oh, what a lovely, trusting horse.
Look at that, coming away from the herd.
How does she look to you?
Oh, she's calling now.
You see the ears is there and trying to get out, worry.
And this is not a one off.
More horses from Gordon Elliott's yard were given to the same
dealer on other occasions, and ended up slaughtered.
No, that is not a humane process, being transported.
350 miles potentially carrying an injury is not a humane process.
The bottom line is horses, if they are to be euthanized,
could and should be euthanized at home.
This is unnecessary suffering.
Gordon Elliot, whose suspension as a trainer is due
to end in September, told us:
High Expectations had
"arthritic knees" and a "tendon injury" that was "career-ending"
and made him "unsafe for riding".
Kiss Me Kayf had "recurring lameness" that made her unsuitable
for rehoming or riding.
He says neither he nor the owners received any money,
and no animals were sent by him to an abattoir.
The first time he learned of their fate was when
Panorama contacted him.
He says the dealer he gave them to was "a longstanding
and well-recognised individual in the racing industry".
The dealer told us that every horse he is given
is "treated with the utmost care and compassion".
But not every horse is suitable for a life outside of racing.
Those that have suffered injuries but are fit to travel are sent to be
humanely euthanized.
All passports are checked.
Mr Elliot says that in the case of these three particular horses,
none had passports marked unfit for human consumption.
So what about the owners of the horses?
Vyta Du Roc's owners said they were "shocked and furious"
when we told them what happened.
They'd taken appropriate steps to ensure Vyta would be rehomed
with a caring new keeper.
High Expectations' owner did not reply.
And the struggling Kiss me Kayf?
Well, she belonged to one of the biggest
names in Irish racing - Caren Walsh.
She's on the board of Horse Racing Ireland
and its horse welfare committee.
She
Sport.
It's something you always dream of when you have horses.
For groups of people, friends, relatives, whatever,
to group together to have a horse and get excited and have something
to watch is very important, I think.
Caren Walsh says she understood that on the basis of veterinary advice,
the horse was to be euthanized in Ireland due to persistent
lameness and her unsuitable temperament.
She had no idea the horse was slaughtered at an
abattoir in England.
Horse Racing Ireland says it places great importance on the welfare
of the horses in the industry and directly supports
the Irish Horse Welfare Trust, which seeks to rehome and retrain
thoroughbreds no longer active in racing.
It did not respond to Panorama's questions regarding the number
of racehorses being slaughtered.
The British Horseracing Authority says it has "demonstrated a clear
commitment to improving already high standards of care for racehorses"
before, during and after racing, and that it would "consider
carefully any issues raised" in the programme.
I can understand why people are attracted to racing,
because I was attracted to it myself.
But because of the poor welfare record, the number of horses dying
and being killed in slaughterhouses, I can no longer support that.
And I think a lot of the public would feel the same way.
Beneath the glamour of horse racing, there lies a dark side.
Isn't it time those who regulate the sport of kings ensure all horses
are treated with dignity and care at the end of their racing careers?