Uptight jockey club gives horses euthanasia
(Shanghai Daily)
Updated: 2005-12-01 09:05

The Beijing Jockey Club has put hundreds of horses to death, Shanghai Morning Post reported yesterday.

Staff of the club took the "unqualified" horses - retired, not good enough for racing, badly hurt or suffering incurable diseases - to a big deep hole near the club.

Vets gave the horses lethal injections. A scraper then pushed the bodies into the hole, the newspaper said. The horses were buried 3 meters underground.

It was euthanasia, an Irish chief racing officer of the club told the paper.

Residents living close to the club are worried that ground water could be polluted. They also fear the killing was caused by a disease epidemic.

But the local vet authority denied this. Ground water "should not be affected," said the head of the vet quarantine station in Beijing's Tongzhou District.

Chen Jinquan, the vice general manager of the club, told a reporter they killed the horses to prevent them coming back to market or being mistreated.

Chen said burying the horses would not pollute the ground water.

Mainland people pay less attention to horse racing because the government prohibits gambling on the sport.

A horse costs 30,000 yuan (US$3,714) a year to maintain. The 2,000-horse club pays at least 1 million yuan a month to care for its horses, Chen said.

Racing clubs in some big cities, such as Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Wuhan and Beijing, were established in the 1990s, but most were closed because of gambling, said Du Yuchuan, secretary of the China Horse Industry Association. Only the Beijing and Wuhan clubs remain, but both are in financial straits.

The Guangzhou club once turned over bets of 10 million yuan a day, but has now been turned into a vehicle market, the newspaper said.