By admin 
Racing Post reported this week that Tripadvisor has decided most horse racing experiences don’t meet its animal welfare guidelines. The racing industry’s response was predictable.
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We pointed to the progress we’ve made. To declining fatality rates. To increased veterinary scrutiny, better data collection, improved racetrack surfaces, and research intended to identify horses at greater risk of injury before they run.
All of that matters. All of it is real. But that hasn’t necessarily changed how people outside racing see us. And that’s something we need to acknowledge.
I understand why people inside racing are angry about Tripadvisor’s decision. I also understand what someone outside the sport sees.
They see horses injured and sometimes killed while participating in an activity that exists, ultimately, for human entertainment. We can explain all the work that goes into preventing those injuries. We can explain that horses can suffer catastrophic injuries in a pasture, too. We can explain that the people caring for these horses overwhelmingly love them.
None of those things makes the risk disappear.
I don’t say that because I’ve given up on making racing safer. Quite the opposite. I’ve spent much of my career reporting on the people trying to do exactly that, and I believe the progress they’ve made matters. Racing is safer by several measures than it was 10 or 15 years ago, and I don’t want to minimize that progress. But much of it has been incremental.
Some amount of risk will always be inherent in what we ask racehorses to do; that’s hardly a revelation. What’s harder to accept is that no matter how much progress we make, there may always be people who look at the risk that remains and decide it’s too much.
It’s tempting to make conversations like this about racing’s bad actors. Certainly, there are people who make indefensible decisions with horses. There are trainers who run horses they shouldn’t, people who give them drugs they shouldn’t, and people who put winning or money ahead of the animal in front of them.
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Those cases at least give us something concrete to address. Identify the behavior. Punish it. Write a better rule if one is needed.
The case I struggle with more is the trainer who does everything right. The horse has been carefully managed. The trainer listens to the veterinarian. The pre-race exam finds nothing alarming. Maybe the horse has even passed whatever additional screening tools racing develops in the years ahead.
And then the gate opens, and something catastrophic happens anyway.
What do we tell the person watching from outside racing? That nobody did anything wrong?
Everyone may have done what they were supposed to do, and the horse still died.
That is heavy.
I think racing sometimes hears criticism from outsiders and immediately assumes the problem is that they don’t understand us. If they knew how well these horses are cared for, we think. If they understood how much we’re spending on safety research. If they could see how devastated the people in the barn are when a horse is lost.
I wish those things were enough. They should be part of the conversation, but they don’t entitle us to the conclusion we want. And for some people, the problem isn’t how safely we race horses. It’s that we race them at all.
Tripadvisor may have drawn its line in a place racing believes is unfair. We can challenge the reasoning behind that line. We can provide evidence that the sport has changed. And we should continue doing everything we can to make racing safer, even when the next improvement is frustratingly small.
But ultimately, social license isn’t something racing can award itself.
We can tell the public what we’re doing. We can show them the progress. We can be honest about the failures and about what we still don’t know.
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We don’t get to tell them they have to believe us.
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This story was originally published September 16, 2026 at 9:38 AM.