Kate Emery: If you really care about animals then the Melbourne Cup is the least of your worries

The Melbourne Cup is run and done for another year so we can stop pretending to have strong views on track conditions, handicaps and how early in the day is too early to remove one’s heels. We can also stop pretending to care about animal welfare. By “we” I mean the fairweather animal lovers who get fired up about the cruelty of racing every year, lamenting the barbarity of the industry before going home to a plate of spag bol or a burger. The hypocrisy kills me, much the way that the Australian meat industry kills about eight million cows, 635 million chickens and five million pigs every year. Racing isn’t kind to horses. In the past racing year, 139 horses reportedly died on Australian racetracks. Training methods can be cruel and many ex-racing horses end their days at an abattoir long before their number should be up. But what gets me riled up like a punter who’s just won the trifecta but lost their ticket is the earnestness with which a certain kind of person acts like the Melbourne Cup is the sole purveyor of animal cruelty. In this person’s eyes, the Cup is the final boss in a video game — the one you have to beat to win — rather than being largely indistinguishable from a lot of other bad guys. I’m not talking about diehard vegans, who can be annoying if they corner you at a party but are at least practicising what they preach. I’m talking about people who bang on about how racing is unconscionably cruel but think nothing of eating meat, buying leather products and using beauty creams that have been tested on the eyes of fluffy bunnies. Horses are beautiful — there’s a reason the Impressionist master Edgar Degas could only drag himself away from ballet dancers to paint horses instead — but are their lives worth so much more than a pig, a cow or a chicken? Would a pig seem more worthy of protection if we dressed a toddler in silks and persuaded them to ride it around a tiny track? (Yes, definitely, can we . . . do that?) My personal feelings about the Cup are complex. I am an animal lover who avoids consuming many — but not all — animal products for ethical reasons. I am also a keen horserider who can appreciate that some people choose to work with horses because they love and respect them. Racing isn’t a force for good: it’s not making the world a better place like, say, double-coat Tim Tams. But nor is it the worst example of normalised animal cruelty. Far from it. Put it this way: if I was an animal I’d rather be a horse, bred to race, than a cow, bred for slaughter or a bunny, bred to have some lady’s moisturiser squirted in my eyes so she can tackle her crow’s feet. Millions more animals are killed for the dinner table than by racing. More animals live wretched lives being tested on by some of the world’s biggest beauty brands — often via third parties in China, which allows them to be cute with their marketing — than as a result of racing horses. In the Western world, eating meat is no longer necessary for survival but a choice for pleasure and convenience. Just as some people love the taste of a truly excellent lasagne or steak enough not to think too much about where it come from, so others love the excitement of a racetrack enough not to think too hard about what might happen to the horses they’re cheering on. If you care about animals, the Cup should be the least of your worries. Moreover, the idea that virtuous opposition to the Cup will end the racing industry seems about as blindly optimistic as Elon Musk’s belief that charging for blue ticks on Twitter will rake in the billions or State Liberal leader David Honey still hanging on in there. The Cup may not pull the numbers it used to — TV viewers hit a 20-year low this year — but people don’t stop watching sport because it’s dangerous for people, let alone for animals. To take another massive global sports industry, we know that boxing can cause serious brain injuries but it remains wildly popular and profitable. Hell, if you want to sign your six-year-old up to boxing classes in Perth you can do it tomorrow. If the sight of Muhammad Ali’s shaking hands as he lit the flame at the Atlanta Olympics didn’t kill boxing — Ali’s early onset Parkinson’s was likely a result of repeated head trauma — nobody’s #NupToTheCup social media post is going to kill racing. Or the Cup.