Sustainability and the Thoroughbred Breeding and Racing Industries: An Enhanced One Welfare Perspective.
Authors: Stallones Lorann, McManus Phil, McGreevy Paul
Journal: Animals : an open access journal from MDPI
Summary
# Editorial Summary The Thoroughbred racing industry faces mounting pressure to demonstrate sustainability across animal welfare, human welfare, and environmental impacts—a challenge that simplistic calls for bans fail to address productively. McGreevy and colleagues developed an Enhanced One Welfare Framework that extends beyond traditional animal-centric assessment to examine costs and benefits across the entire racing ecosystem: equine health and performance, human participants and their families, communities, and environmental footprint. By integrating the Five Domains model (nutrition, environment, health, behaviour, and mental state) with broader One Welfare principles, the authors reveal that industry viability depends fundamentally on demonstrating lifelong welfare outcomes for horses whilst simultaneously accounting for socioeconomic and ecological dimensions that affect stakeholders from breeding through to end-of-career management. The framework positions welfare not as an ancillary concern but as central to the industry's credibility and longevity, offering a more nuanced policy tool than polarised debates around banning the sport. For equine professionals engaged in racing—farriers managing musculoskeletal demands, veterinarians assessing fitness to compete, nutritionists optimising performance, and physiotherapists rehabilitating injuries—this integrated approach underscores the professional responsibility to evaluate each horse's comprehensive wellbeing within a sustainable business model, rather than viewing welfare as separate from industry economics.
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Practical Takeaways
- •Adopt the Enhanced One Welfare Framework when developing or evaluating welfare protocols to ensure comprehensive consideration of horse, human, and environmental outcomes in racing operations.
- •Use the Five Domains model as a structured tool to assess and improve lifelong welfare standards for Thoroughbreds from breeding through retirement.
- •Engage stakeholders in discussions about sustainable racing practices by framing welfare improvements within broader sustainability contexts that benefit horses, industry participants, and communities.
Key Findings
- •The Enhanced One Welfare Framework incorporates sport, leisure, and entertainment industries within the Five Domains model to address sustainability in Thoroughbred breeding and racing.
- •International Federation of Horseracing Authorities recognizes lifelong horse welfare as fundamentally important to industry viability and sustainability as of 2020.
- •The proposed framework extends beyond animal welfare to consider human welfare and physical environmental impacts of racing industries.
- •Traditional One Welfare frameworks historically lacked focus on sport and entertainment sectors, limiting their applicability to equine industries.