FOLLOWING my article on the whip issue last week, one tweeter posed the question to me: “Have you had a whip cracked across your back from Davy Russell? Not once, maybe 10 or 15 times? Tell me then it doesn’t hurt.”

This is the mistake that so many make in so many aspects of horse racing, they humanise horses too much. Most people’s idea of testing the severity of a whip is slapping it down on the palm of their hand or maybe even across their own “hind quarters”, but this just isn’t comparable to reality on any number of levels.