By ROSEMARY MOORE
The horse lies dead, its eyes staring and bright blood trickling from the bullet wound to its head. A semi-circle of horses stand behind, heads wearily bowed.
The image points to an outpost of the racing industry that few Cup Day partygoers see: the knackery. It’s an image the Coalition for the Protection of Racehorses (CPR) is using on social media to spearhead its 2015 Spring Racing Carnival campaign.
A slightly modified version (minus the blood) was rejected by billboard and taxi companies, says Elio Celotto, campaign director for CPR. A similarly graphic image was removed from a billboard on CityLink near Footscray Road last year. This didn’t deter CPR from using a confronting image again this year.
“Last year’s was very successful because it drew attention to the CPR’s cause,” Celotto says.
Did CPR intentionally use a controversial image to attract publicity? Kind of.
“We don’t mind being labelled as media whores; we don’t mind if people hate us. We didn’t want last year’s billboard to come down but we did want it to have some effect and create outrage,” Celotto says.
Creating outrage and shaming the industry into taking better care of horses that are injured, fail or are surplus to needs is a goal of CPR. Its website carries video and other images of horses massed in transport vehicles and saleyards and caught in abattoir kill boxes.
Such images contrast dramatically with those celebrating the racing carnival – stylish young women, hats, horses adorned with flowers and ribbons, and joyous racegoers urging their horse to a win.
University of Sydney Prof Phil McManus, who is co-author of The Global Horseracing Industry: Social, economic, environmental and ethical perspectives, says the CPR's image provokes an important question.
“My initial response is that this is what happens — it’s not a fictional image. It’s not the whole story, but neither is the party image from the racing industry — of fun, colour and glamour. It’s asking, who’s not going to the party? Clearly some horses aren’t,” he says.
Prof McManus is among those urging the racing industry to become more transparent about the number of horses that are destroyed every year when they are injured or prove to be inefficient racehorses (known as industry "wastage"). Other critics include the RSPCA and Animals Australia.
The precise number of racehorses destroyed every year is disputed between CPR and the racing industry, but even the industry acknowledges that not every horse bred for racing lives out its natural life.
As Racing Victoria explains on its website, it has introduced a "retirement rule" and estimates more than 90 per cent of horses leaving the industry over the past year were rehomed directly to the equestrian, pleasure or breeding industries.
But even by Racing Victoria estimates, that leaves perhaps one in 10 racehorses unaccounted for. They also don’t tell us about the horses bred for racing that don’t make it to the racetrack, the CPR says. Images of horses at a slaughterhouse suggest one possible outcome.
“Aspects of the racing industry do need to be exposed. For many years people did not think too much about what happens to the animals. Now there’s more awareness of things like whipping and wastage and a desire to try to improve the welfare of horses," Prof McManus says.
"The top horses are well looked after, but others — you wonder what happens. Their lives should be as good as possible: they’re sentient, we know they have feelings like fear; they’re herd animals. There are gaps in our knowledge of what happens to them, and this is being highlighted through such images,” Professor McManus says.
The use of graphic images is a perennial issue for animal activist organisations. Arguably, graphic images are effective when there’s an obvious "other" group responsible for the abuse: such as baby-seal killers, Japanese whalers, exporters of live cattle and sheep, puppy farmers and greyhound racers. In such cases, the average person may be roused to action by graphic images.
But when average people are made to feel complicit in neglect or abuse, for example because they eat meat or wear wool or have a bet on race day, it can get complicated.
Sociologist Dr Marie Mika, who specialises in marketing and is an animal welfare, human rights and environmental activist, studied the impact of "moral shock" images from the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA).
One example of "moral shock" imagery is a poster that juxtaposes battery hens with Nazi concentration camp victims with the slogan: "To animals, all people are Nazis".
Dr Mika found the PETA images elicited an overwhelmingly negative reaction and no intention to change behaviour. The same could result from using images of dead horses around the time of race day.
“Just in my opinion, because it’s not a distant abstraction but directly impacts people’s visceral pleasure in the horse racing carnival, the group [CPR] has further to go to change people’s attitudes," she says.
"A different approach might work better. It’s a real risk to go out there with a graphic image and message. If people are going to shut down, they’re going to dig in and not listen. Choosing a path where people will more likely listen to you and hear you is going to be a better course.”
People involved in animal activism can forget how far their moral stance has moved from that of many ordinary people, Dr Mika says.
“Someone once said of his journey in animal activism, ‘When I began, I thought that when people were exposed to the same images, they would be affected in similar ways to me’. You think that what worked on you will work in the same way on everyone but that’s just not the case.
“When you work in animal activism, you make so many friends and connections who think in similar ways to you: who see animals and humans on the same moral plane. You think if you shock people, it will change them, but people don’t necessarily want to see this. You forget how far from normal your moral stance has become,” Dr Mika says.
A risk of using graphic images is that it will distress people so much they don’t act.
Dr Tim Jones, associate professor in marketing and strategic management at the Memorial University of Newfoundland, who has studied violent images in marketing, points to the phenomenon of "attentional rubbernecking" — where the content makes people look away.
So while an organisation’s intention may be to get people to remonstrate with an industry or their Member of Parliament, the actual effect of a picture of a horse with a bullet wound to the head or a faeces-covered puppy farm dog may be that people turn away and try to quickly forget it.
“There is lots of previous work done on shock advertising and its effects — the conclusions are that initial levels of shock heighten arousal, but that this diminishes when it reaches a certain level — ie, it has an inverted U effect — if shock is too high, the effect of the shocking content actually impairs intended responses,” Dr Jones says.
The CPR’s Elio Celotto is unconcerned if some people turn away from the CPR’s images.
“Those people probably wouldn’t have got the message no matter how we pitch it to them. The reality of what is done to racehorses is more confronting. We’re not doing this to offend — we’re doing this to stop this happening: racehorses going to the slaughterhouse rather than into retirement. It is an industry problem and the industry needs to find a solution,” he says.
Celotto argues that CPR has been having an impact, pointing to some positive moves in the racing industry — for example, industry monitoring for and scanning and rescue of thoroughbreds found at Echuca saleyards.
“Because of pressure from groups like ours, they are acknowledging that they have a substantial problem,” he says.
Its current campaign image may shock, Celotto says, but it represents a little-known truth about the fate of many horses in the racing industry.
“This is the reality of what they go through.”