Illogical and irresponsible too (and I'm not talking about myself, for once)

Off to Brighton tomorrow.  Looking forward to it.  Roy (naturally).  His first attempt at a mile and a half this season after having had two runs there this spring at ten furlongs, and I hope that he'll be competitive.  He's inching back down the ratings' list.  If he's inched far enough down he will go very close; if he needs to inch down a bit more, he won't be quite so close.  But he has everything else in his favour: his favourite course, his favourite distance, his favourite ground (fast) and his favourite jockey (John Egan), and he's very well.  Fingers crossed for a good run.

Aside from getting preparing for our only trip to the races of the week, the other big feature of life in the past few days has been having our two kittens, George and Percy, gelded.  They are about six months old now so were ready (in fact, Percy was making it plain that he was more than ready) so it was a relief to have them neutered.  One can think of downsides, obviously, but basically I just look at it that their life-expectancy has increased for the operation being done.  Boy cats do tend to roam, particularly at night, and the chance of their being run over is hugely lessened if one removes their incentive for leaving the property.

In general, I'm in the camp that one should have all one's animals neutered at the earliest opportunity unless there is any realistic chance that one might want to breed from them at some point in the future.  Dogs and cats, obviously; but horses too.  For horses, in particularly, their quality of life improves massively once they are gelded.  (We're talking only about male horses, obviously).  One of my pet hates is people whose modus operandi is to geld horses far later than common sense says should be the case, mostly from the point of view of the horses' enjoyment of life, but also from the point of view of those who handle them.

I've been thinking a bit about this not solely because of Georgie-Boy and Little Percy paying a visit to the vet's surgery on Friday, but also because of geldings being barred from the Commonwealth Cup and because of a gelding (Mustashry) winning the Lockinge Stakes on Saturday.  What's the deal with the Commonwealth Cup?  Isn't this just very silly?  We're told that it is in line with policy on all Group One races restricted to three-year-olds - but what's prompted this policy?  We know that geldings can't run in the Classics, but the only justifiable reason for maintaining that policy is a respect for tradition and heritage.  To apply the policy to new races, races which have no tradition or heritage, is ludicrous.

Why do I say this?  Why does the initial reason for barring geldings from the Classics no longer apply to the major three-year-olds' races?  Well, there's one very good reason - they have been overtaken by events.  The idea behind barring geldings from the Derby was so that we could find out which horse was naturally the best, rather than the best after having had a performance-enhancing operation.  So geldings were barred, because at the time gelding a horse was the only performance-enhancing operation that there was.

But that's no longer the case.  Wind operations are the most obvious and most common performance-enhancing operation, but there are also no end of operations that can be and are done to horses' legs. And I don't just mean operations to repair damage done to the horses on the way through: unbroken horses can have operations to correct perceived conformation deformities.  What is the sense in barring geldings from running in, say, the Commonwealth Cup when horses who have had wind operations or leg operations can run in the race?  Answer: none whatsoever.  I actually think that the move is worse than useless because, from a welfare point of view, we ought to be encouraging people to geld their colts sooner rather than later rather than providing them with further reasons not to do so; so it's not just illogical to bar geldings from these races, but irresponsible too.