IT was certainly a racing week where you were asked to take sides. And most people did. Many prominent racing folk were at odds with each other and against the general public opinion.

Sir Mark Todd hitting a horse with a branch of a tree to get it to overcome the fear of jumping into water – terrible behaviour or these things happen when you need to train animals? Was it cruelty?

Did a ‘Sir’, honoured for services to the industry, get treated differently by the racing authority than G Elliott (Ire), son of panel beater?

It took until Wednesday for the BHA to announce the suspension of Todd’s licence where as in the Elliott incident, they acted with much more haste in banning him from having entries at the Cheltenham Festival.

Respected

On Twitter posts and on various podcasts this week, many respected racing voices dismissed the sanctions and against Todd as unfair.

On different podcasts, Kevin Blake and David Redvers stated they did not see the Todd incident as an act of cruelty. Using the wrong equipment was the opinion.

Redvers said on the Nick Luck’s podcast: “There was nothing cruel about this, I know it looks bad and I get people being upset”, there was a “healthy debate to be had about training and the techniques used.” Cruelty was defined as “deriving pleasure from pain” which this was not.

Certainly, were we to allow filming of the process of ‘breaking’ a horse to be ridden, it might not always look too good to those outside the equine industry.

Another of the opinions expressed on various podcasts was that the racing media were very slow to make headlines out of this, compared to the Elliott incident.

This too has an element of danger when the general media only look to racing for negative headlines. If we supply them, they will be picked up.

Too hasty

The BHA did have to act quicker for the Elliott case, even if pre-empting the investigation and ‘punishment’ by the IHRB did look a bit hasty. Cheltenham was on the doorstep and a decision had to made whether to allow him entries in his own name.

The justification was that Sir Mark Todd is nothing like as prominent in our sport as Gordon Elliott, so this story is unlikely to have the same impact.

Racing’s opponents have it easy these days. Damaging material is turning up on social media too often. You can say that horsemen urgently need to stop feeding the beast that wants to eat them.

There was a comment that incidents like the fatal injury to Mister Tommytucker and others were more distressing and those can’t be hidden.

The complete Todd video did put the incident in a wider context but for all that he has been a revered figure in eventing, it did seem to me that you might expect a bit more ‘expertise’ in a training clinic than hitting a horse with a branch.

It did seem that there is acceptance of what we can pass off as expected behaviour. Do we expect that most people training horses will have hit them on occasion when a half-tonne animal becomes stubborn?

We don’t expect to see a trainer to be photographed sitting astride a dead horse, even if it comes under disrespect rather than any obvious cruelty?

Of course it should also be remembered that there are individuals who brought “the sport into disrepute” here and did it for malice or mischief by posting the photo and video and they got off without any sanctions.

Is it good to point out your neighbour washing his dirty linen in public? Yes, if cruelty or malpractice is involved, but you begin to think that it sometimes causes more harm than good.

It was a point made by Jane Mangan on the Luck podcast. “Conduct ourselves as though the camera is always on.” That might be the only advice for the times.