Deathwatch

For a one year period from 1 August 2019 to 31 July 2020, the Coalition for the Protection of Racehorses has collected data from the stewards reports from every state and territory in Australia, compiling a detailed report of the horses who have died in racing and the reasons why – something that is not made available to the public each year by the industry itself.

Click here to read our Deathwatch 2020 Report.

Key Findings

• 116 horses killed on track for a number of reasons most commonly for catastrophic front limb injury (59)
• On average one horse will die on Australian racetracks every 3 days
• 10 horses died from cardiac causes
• 9 horses died from bleeds
• The state with the highest recorded deaths was NSW (43) followed by VIC (31) and QLD (25)
• 45 of the horses that were killed had been raced as a 2-year-old
• 9 horses were only 2-years-old when they died on track
• 5 horses are still listed as ‘active’ on the Racing Australia website at the time of writing, even though some have been dead for almost a year