Every year the Grand National Horse race at Aintree in the UK attracts bets totalling £300 million. Every year there are horses that fall over and die as they are flogged around the circuit, forced to jump over vertiginous obstacles and leap across water filled gaps.
Forty horses line up at the starting tape and around 60% of the entrants will not complete the race, which is four and a half miles long and has 30 fences to jump.
This year was no different to most others apart from the sheer number of police present as they attempted to stop an animal rights protest from disrupting the precedings. (which they still managed to do anyway)
As always horses ran; horses fell; and horses died. (hence the protests)
Organisers of the race defend it by stating that horse deaths are a comparatively rare event. You can judge that one for yourself based on the statistics. Be that the case, the organisers should put their money where their stats are and offer massively large odds on the chances of any horse dying on the course due to a race injury. A million to one should do it. [marked-for-protest]-- xenzag, Apr 17 2023 https://www.grandna...al.fans/race-guide/ [xenzag, Apr 17 2023] For [a1] https://en.wikipedi.../wiki/Wife-carryingPiggy-back racing, for couples! [neutrinos_shadow, Apr 17 2023] Slow Horses - excellent series by author Mick Herron https://www.google....printsec=frontcover [normzone, Apr 20 2023] I think any good bookmaker should offer odds on anything you fancy. They don't really care what the thing is, as long as they can make a profit on the spread between the odds of it happening and the odds of it not happening.
So it should be possible to walk into a bookies and lay a bet that a horse will die, or fall, or be eaten by a tiger, or that the police will arrest a protestor, or that the protestor will escape the police, or anything really.
So this is just "lets all" bet on deaths. Which may well be a viable protest strategy against cruelty spectacle, but I'm not sure it counts as a HB idea.
Also, the race organisers don't offer odds. The bookies do. So it is also misguided as to implementation.-- pocmloc, Apr 17 2023 Ah, but the idea is that the race organisers *should* offer the odds, in this case. Or, rather, that people should challenge the race organisers to offer those odds and then, when the race organisers refuse, should point out that the race organisers are lying when they claim that horse deaths are rare and that, because of their refusal to offer those odds, we know that they know that they're lying.
This would be an excellent idea in a world where bad people could be shamed by other people pointing out, with cogent evidence, that they're lying. Unfortunately, we all left that world a few years back.-- pertinax, Apr 17 2023 I don't know how they're defining "comparatively rare", but 11 of the last 20 years have had at least 1 fatality, and I make it about 1.6% of equine participants. Which doesn't seem all that rare to me.
But on the other hand, I would say that one in a million isn't just "comparatively rare", it's "very rare indeed".
I'm not sure you can oblige organisations to put their money where their mouth is. But you can publicly shame them. Perhaps next year beforehand you could try to get something published in the newspapers - send them a public letter stating the facts (i.e. that they say it's "comparatively rare"), suggest that be defined as "One in a hundred races with a fatality" and then offer them a bet with comparatively generous odds in relation to that.-- Loris, Apr 17 2023 [marked-for-deletion] rant. Also I don't have a pony in this race, but horses are highly competitive and don't need to be forced to race: they like racing. Human runners suffer injuries and deaths all the time, do we need to outlaw marathons?-- Voice, Apr 17 2023 //Human runners suffer injuries and deaths all the time, do we need to outlaw marathons?//
If 1.6% of runners died as a result of a marathon, it might be worth considering banning that particular one. For scale, that would be about 640 dead after the London marathon.
According to the internet, the hardest human endurance race is the "Marathon Des Sables" - in 2021 there were 672 participants and /one/ died - leading to questions being asked over its safety. If it was as hard a race as the Grand National is on horses, 11 people would die in a typical year, assuming that the same number of participants.-- Loris, Apr 17 2023 //Human runners suffer injuries and deaths all the time, do we need to outlaw marathons?// How many marathon runners are beaten around the course over a series of giant obstacles by someone who has climbed onto their back and won't get off?-- xenzag, Apr 17 2023 Whenever I see the words "Slow Horses" I get all excited ... (link)-- normzone, Apr 20 2023 I've heard that underwater potholing (that is, exploring caves underwater) is spectacularly dangerous, but it doesn't feature on your list a1. Maybe because it's such a rare hobby. But having seen part of a documentary where one of the divers they were following didn't come back, I'm not inclined to doubt it.
I tried looking up the mortality rate, and couldn't find any firm or general figures. I did find an analysis of UK cavediving fatalities over 26 years, which says:
"The overall fatality rate for all dives is estimated at 1 in 3,286 dives."
Which doesn't sound too bad. But if we assume 1 dive a month for a 10 year 'career', that would be about one in 27! Of course, I have no idea about frequency or career length, and doubt that it's a particularly useful metric. So we could compare the per-event fatality rate. Various sites cite the base-jumping death rate at 0.04% per jump, which would be 1 in 2500 jumps. So they're maybe in the same ball-park as regards risk.
They are, though, nowhere near the risk taken by horses running in the Grand National, which have a fatality rate of 1 in 62.5-- Loris, Apr 20 2023 random, halfbakery