Dead horse advertisement on Melbourne billboard distasteful, Racing Victoria says

Updated

A billboard on a major Melbourne road showing a dead racehorse has been branded "distasteful" and "highly inappropriate" by racing advocates.

The advertisement on CityLink near Footscray Road was arranged by the Coalition for the Protection of Racehorses to raise awareness about animal welfare in the horse racing industry ahead of the Spring Racing Carnival.

But Racing Victoria chief executive Bernard Saundry labelled the sign offensive.

"To put a dead animal - be it a horse, a dog or a cat - on a billboard is highly inappropriate and distasteful," Mr Saundry said.

"The billboard is offensive both to the 70,000 participants within the Victorian thoroughbred racing industry who love and care for their animals and indeed to the wider community who are travelling past this distasteful image."

Horses are still being sent to slaughter when they're no longer profitable. Ward Young, Coalition for the Protection of Racehorses

On the list of the coalition's demands is a ban on the use of whips and an end to jumps racing.

It has claimed these practices are among the causes of horse deaths every racing season.

Coalition spokesman Ward Young said he also had concerns about the treatment of horses rejected from the racing industry.

"Horses are still being sent to slaughter when they're no longer profitable," he said.

"The race industry rejected a straightforward proposal to re-home all of these horses."

But Mr Saundry rejected the coalition's claims.

"The inference that horse racing kills its equine athletes is misleading and very disappointing for the many people within our industry who have spent the best part of a lifetime caring for horses," he said.

"The average fatality rate in Victorian thoroughbred racing is the lowest in world racing and we are working hard to reduce it even further through stricter medication controls, significant investments in improving tracks and training facilities and the funding of major research studies."

Topics: horse-racing, advertising, animal-welfare, melbourne-3000, flemington-3031

First posted