Horse Protection

Year 2000 will be remembered as the Centenary of the International Equestrian Games as Paris held the first games in 1900. After this first event, many other affairs have been supporting the use of horses in sports as these animals not only provide the human being with their strength for heavy work tasks. Different specialties have been added to equestrianism, the main horse discipline, although horse racing is, without a shred of doubt, the most popular of them all; however, horse racing has multiple disciplines included in several saddle and harness categories such as hunt seat, show hack, jumping, dressage and, of course, riding horse. Other equestrian activities and sports can be polo, gymkhana or o-mok-see, reining, rodeo, rejoneo (horse bullfighting), mounted archery, camp-drafting, Buzkashi, horse-ball, and many other disciplines included in the categories cross-country sports, hunting, hacking, steeplechase, trail riding, etc.

The International Equestrianism Games have brought the most fascinating world-wide events since the first games in Paris in 1900.

These sports have been repeatedly criticized by organizations that state that horses are being exploited for human recreation. However, millions of horse lovers all around the world and more than thousands of equestrian organizations have proven that, horses are not being treated with cruelty as these sports are under the control of governments and animal protection organizations that have established hippodromes all around the world, as we can find in the list below with some of the highly praised hippodromes (click below)

Hippodromes

As in many of the sports disciplines, bets are always part of the competition and, horse games have also involved in gambling activities; in spite of this, horse racing betting, as the most popular discipline, has been always one of the safest gambling practices for both, bettors and horses. There are different types of bets, depending on the country’s regulations (horse racing betting USA); while we have three different options in the United States and Canada (bet to win, bet to place and bet to show), Europe and Asia offer only two of them. A bet to win is a straight bet where the winner gets in first place; a bet to place and a bet to show are based on the race classification, taking in consideration the first three places, although payoffs are not made in the same way.