Last week an illiterate Yorkshireman was found guilty of abusing cockerels and hens who suffered injuries in brutal “cock fights”. He was sentenced to nine months in prison, suspended for 18 months. And he was banned from keeping cockerels and hens for 12 months.
Have you ever heard of anything so ridiculous? Why on earth would one ever let him keep poultry again?
If only this was an isolated case of stupidity, one could shrug it off as an anomaly. But that is not the case. A cursory glance through any search engine reveals cases of domestic animals being kept in disgusting, cruel circumstances. And their owner’s punishment? A pretty standard reaction by the courts is to ban them from keeping animals for five years. But why should these people ever be allowed to keep any animal again?
What, you might be thinking, does this have to do with horse racing? Well quite a lot actually. Because the racing authorities in England and Ireland are as naive as the law courts.
Doping cases in both countries are few and far between, but when they do occasionally crop up, there seems to be undue leniency.
Last week a “racehorse trainer” called Luke Comer was banned in Ireland from training horses for three years.
The reason I use inverted commas is because Comer is no more a trainer than I am a fighter pilot. He is in fact a very rich businessman who lives in Monaco. But unfortunately for him, 12 of his horses tested positive for anabolic steroids.
Comer’s defence was, as far as I can see, first that it was not his fault because he spends only three months of the year in Ireland, and secondly, that there had been environmental contamination from pig slurry.
Comer told the Irish Independent after the ruling: “I am 1,000 per cent innocent. I have never been more right in my life.”
His first line of defence begs two questions. Why on earth did the Irish authorities allow him to hold the licence, given his absence from his horses? And why did he want to hold it anyway?
Perhaps he wanted to take all the glory and deny whoever was actually training the horses their due credit? Or, as it turns out, blame.
Either way, it is absurd to suggest that he should not be punished because he was not paying the sort of attention that a trainer should do. It is also hard to understand how he can blame pig slurry from his sun lounger in Monaco.
All of this would be pretty inconsequential if the Irish authorities had banned Comer from training and owning racehorses for life. But no. He has been told that his licence will only be suspended for three years. And not even immediately. He can carry on now “training” his horses and running them in races until January 1, 2024. You just could not make it up.
But Comer’s case is not unique in Ireland. A few years ago up-and-coming young trainer Philip Fenton was caught with anabolic steroids in his yard. Was he seen to be an unfit person to train horses in the future? No. He was only temporarily banned for three years.
The authorities in the UK are just as culpable. In 2013 Mahmood Al Zarooni was caught doping Sheikh Mohammed Al Maktoum’s horses in Newmarket. He admitted giving steroids to 15 horses. It was blatant and cynical, and yet Zarooni was not banned from training horses for life, and he has subsequently been granted a licence to train in the UAE. That would allow him to run horses in the UK.
In the same year fellow trainer Gerard Butler was banned for five years for injecting some of his horses with steroids intended for human use. But not for life.
Advocating lifetime bans may appear to be unforgiving. But if racing is to survive in a court of increasingly critical public opinion, it needs to be strong on anti-doping.
The racing authorities in America have made a real mess of this. As a result, every headline off the racing pages is negative. Empowered by the swamp of drugs continuously coming to light in racehorse barns in the US, the anti-racing lobby are sharpening their knives.
European governing bodies cannot afford to make the same mistakes.
Explore our list of Grand National free bets right here along with Grand National tips and odds to help you through the week