It’s Monday 2 November, 2015, and the intersection of Flinders and Swanston is closed off for the annual Melbourne Cup parade. The air is thick with the smell of horse manure and the abrasive, tinny sound of a budget PA system with too much treble blasting out race calls of years gone by.

Between two long barricades on Swanston Street passes a motorcade of horse trainers, jockeys and those strange celebrity “ambassadors” that Melbourne’s Spring carnival thrusts forward each year to an apparently receptive and engaged audience – the hundreds of thousands of Melburnians who pour through the gates of racecourses around Melbourne to bet, be seen and most of all it increasingly seems, get thoroughly trousered.

On one side of the crowd, which is never more than two or three spectators deep at any given point, stands a tall and elegantly-suited man of about 50. He could pass for, I think to myself, a solicitor or an accountant from a nearby building, or potentially a racing fan. He seems mildly perplexed but calm as he paces past a dozen police patrolling the festivities.

Directly parallel, outside Young and Jackson’s hotel, stands a scruffy, sunburnt man of about the same age. He’s hurling abuse. “You should be ashamed of yourselves,” he bellows across the parade at one point. I polity inquire whether I can ask him a few questions about his objections to what he’s seeing, a request he declines with a loud and almost sarcastic, “No comment,” and then, after a brief moment’s reflection, a far more emphatic “Fuck off!”

Welcome to Cup week in Melbourne.

The man in the suit, I find out ofter listening to him read through a megaphone the names of 127 horses he says have died on Australian race tracks in the preceding 12 months, is Elio Celotto, a veteran horse racing protestor and the head of the Coalition for the Protection of Racehorses (CPR).

A small but determined group, CPR formed in 2008 as a single issue animal rights organisation and continue to peacefully protest at major race meets, lobbying the racing industry for major reform because, they say, nobody else will. Usually they call the police before the police call them, letting them know which of Melbourne’s major race meets they’ll be turning up to with their banners and Celotto’s megaphone.

CPR call their online home “the website the racing industry doesn’t want you to see,” and it outlines their four primary issues of concern: “wastage”in horses no longer fit for racing are sent to the knackery, the use of whips, the racing of two-year-old horses – which CPR claims are not skeletally mature enough for racing – and jumps racing, whose dangers the group have claimed a prominent role in dragging into the spotlight in the past six years.

To me it feels like a numbers game, one stacked heavily against the likes of Celotto and his colleagues, but seeing him protest the parade last year made me wonder what makes a man take up such a seemingly hopeless cause.

In 2012 Celotto was arrested as he protested a jumps meet at Sandown in Melbourne’s south-east, and again last year outside a major racing day at Sydney’s Rose Hill racecourse which, ironically, he has never actually entered. The arrests, he says, might be more problematic were he not a self-employed builder and property developer.

Speaking to me in the lead-up to planned protests on Derby and Melbourne Cup days this year, 54-year-old Celotto says his journey to animal rights activism began when he read Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation in his mid-20s. Having reached only page 40 page he had a “very defining moment” and concluded that not only could he no longer eat meat, he needed to involve himself in animal rights activism.

“It simply wasn’t enough just to be vegetarian,” Celotto says. “These animals have no voice and I decided to be one of the many people around the world who use their voice for those who can’t speak for themselves.”

His first step to that end was highly unusual; parachuting one day in a country town, Celotto spotted a piggery from the air and wondered what was going on inside. He soon found out by acting as a kind of gonzo undercover investigator, getting himself a job there so he could get an unfiltered glimpse of industry practices. “That was the start of my animal activism,” he says of the months he spent observing up close the way animals are treated when protestors aren’t around.

Laurie Levy’s Coalition against Duck Shooting provided Celotto further inspiration in his decades of work protesting against hunting. “He was someone I greatly admire as someone who was prepared to put himself on the line for the lives of ducks on the wetlands,” Celotto says. “Every person who works in the animal movement is an inspiration for me.”

The suit I saw Celotto wearing at last year’s cup parade is in part of a reflection of the kinds of people he wants to gain access to with his message. He’s in regular contact with Racing Australia CEO Peter McGauran and has successfully lobbied for the racing industry to consider a “retirement plan” for horses. So far that entails the introduction of documentation pertaining to the destination of each racing horse that is retired, though Celotto is not satisfied that it currently goes far enough.

Admire Rakti, the Japanese horse who died in the stalls of the Melbourne Cup in November 2014. Photograph: Julian Smith/AAP

At Spring Carnival time, sub-contractors on Celotto’s building sites are now used to downing tools as the boss dons his suit and heads off to the races. “They think it’s a bit odd, but they’ve got used to it now,” he laughs.

He can’t rule out the possibility that his protesting will get him in further trouble. “You make a decision on what you think is right,” Celotto says of the risk of arrest. “When you’re doing animal rights work, you need to try and make a point and sometimes you have to do things that aren’t technically legal, and you have to make a call on what is more important. Often the call is made that standing up for animals is more important than risking a fine or being charged with something.

“Throughout history, whenever there’s been any kind of social movement, it’s because people have been prepared to fight for what they believe in. There are a lot of people standing up for animals right now and they need to, because they need our help.”

Celotto is realistic that the racing industry isn’t going anywhere fast and that “the end aim will never be achieved”, but sets himself realistic goals and wants to ensure racehorses are given the same respect as any other animal.

“They deserve the right to live their entire lives free of pain and suffering and to do that the whip needs to be abolished,” Celotto says. He points to Norwegian racing – which banned the whip in 1982 – as an example that the sport can survive just fine without it. “To me, abolishing the whip would be the greatest thing the racing industry could do but because they’re like an old dinosaur, they’re very resistant to any kind of change.”

Celotto is most insistent on the idea of a retirement plan for horses, and remains most worried about what happens to thoroughbreds when the marquees are packed up and the fascinators are stored away for another year. “It’s going to happen slowly and there are some positive steps being made and we applaud the racing industry for taking those steps,” he says.

“We’re in talks with Racing Victoria and Racing Australia. We’ve brought to their attention issues relating to what happens to racehorses when their career is over. They’ve responded by now having a retirement form, which we don’t think is anywhere near acceptable, but at least they now have a retirement form.”

That form, the AR64J, doesn’t require owners to detail exactly where the horse is going and it’s often impossible to track exactly where horses actually end up. Celotto is also scathing when he discusses jumps racing, which he describes as a “blight on the racing industry”.

“You see horses falling and dying for the entertainment of very few people.”

On Melbourne Cup day Celotto and up to 200 friends of the CPR, including members of the Melbourne LGBTI community, will gather for a picnic at Newmarket Reserve – not just to protest, but create a festive atmosphere of their own with “human races”.

“We’ll have all our flags and banners. Our message will be to show people that you don’t have to go to the Melbourne Cup or any race meet to have a good time,” Celotto says. “Some of the races are going to be really wacky. We’ve got the ‘High Stakes’, which is about having either the highest heels or the highest fascinator, rather than who crosses the finishing line first. It’s about who does it with the most style.”

Underlying every protest Celotto organises, he says, is the belief that animals not be treated as “just animals”.

“I wouldn’t say the people involved in racing are necessarily bad people,” he concludes with words I find slightly surprising. “I would say that there’s a lot of people in racing that fail to recognise the horse’s innate nature. These animals are no different to any living animal, including humans. They seek to avoid harm. They seek to be happy. They’re no different to people, and they feel pain. They’re treated like they’re disposable objects.

“We live in a time where our planet is very much designed to benefit humans. There’s 20 million different species of animals and plants out there who also inhabit this planet. We’re all basically trying to do the same thing: live our lives avoiding pain and suffering and being happy. Racehorses are no different.”

