MEET OUR HORSE MEAT

Greyhound racing has become a major animal welfare issue in Australia, and though you might think it’s a separate topic from our usual focus on horses, the global horse-meat trade, and the horse racing industry –  both racing industries share disturbing similarities rooted in how animals are exploited for entertainment, gambling, and profit — often intersecting in ways the public rarely sees.

At first glance, greyhounds and horses appear to belong to entirely different worlds. One races on sand tracks, the other mostly on grass. One is a dog, the other a horse.

Different species. Different industries. Different conversations.

But when you step back and look at how these industries actually function, the differences fall away.

Both rely on overbreeding to produce a small number of winners.

Both accept injury and death as routine costs of doing business.

Both discard animals once performance drops or profit ends.

Both are sustained by gambling revenue (taxpayers’ funds) and public tolerance, not genuine concern for animal welfare.

And in Australia, these industries do not merely resemble one another — they overlap.

Racing industries tend to focus public attention on performance — not on what happens when animals can no longer compete.

In greyhound racing, dogs who fail to perform, are injured, or are deemed surplus can vanish from public accounting.

Just like with horses, there is NOT any reliable, nationwide system ensuring greyhound’s welfare outcomes are tracked for life.

Racehorses (and other horses including Brumbies) disappear to knackeries.

In Australia, horses who are no longer profitable — including former racehorses (known as ‘wastage‘)  — can be slaughtered and processed into commercial markets, including pet food and raw meat products.

Horse meat is commonly supplied to greyhound owners and trainers and, in some cases, delivered directly to racing facilities or training tracks as feed.

In this way, horses bred and raced for gambling and entertainment can ultimately be absorbed into another racing industry, after their own careers have ended.

This is not about individual bad actors.

It is about systems that normalise disposal once economic value of sentient beings is exhausted.

Meet Our Horse Meat exists to expose what happens after the cheering stops — when animals are no longer useful, marketable, or profitable.

Greyhound racing belongs here because it operates on the same logic that feeds the horse-meat trade:

horses are bred faster than homes can be found,

careers are short and injuries common,

and responsibility for outcomes is fragmented or denied.

Like horse racing, greyhound racing has responded to criticism with promises of reform: better tracking, welfare standards, injury reporting, retirement programs.

Yet decades of reform have not resolved the core problem — because the core problem is not compliance. It is volume.

You cannot breed thousands of animals for speed, race them at maximum intensity, and then responsibly care for every individual life afterward.

The maths doesn’t work. It never has.

This is why welfare organisations, veterinarians, and advocacy groups across Australia continue to raise alarms — and why public support for greyhound racing and horse racing is eroding.