Mike Dillon: Bigger is better in jumping debate

I'm confused.

Racing Victoria's lifeline to allow jumps racing to continue smacks of an each-way bet.

Animal welfare activists, who caused the chaos, the general public and all jumps racing participants, ironically, all want the same thing - safety for the equine and human combatants.

Yet in all the new conditions Racing Victoria has placed on the jumps game to allow it to continue, they didn't include the one that would massively improve safety - bigger fences.

You cannot find anyone in Victoria who does not agree that the skimpy Australian hurdles are death traps.

Racing Victoria has received widespread recommendations to increase the size of fences, particularly for hurdle races.

Four of the five horse fatalities in Melbourne this year have been in races over hurdles.

The fifth was in a steeplechase where the jockey has been widely criticised for not having pulled a seemingly exhausted horse out of the contest.

All of RVL's new conditions are simply band-aid measures.

In an effort to slow jumps races down, they will now be flag started rather than using the starting stalls.

Fair dinkum. That might slow the field for the first 150m, if that.

The last fence in every race will be removed and the second-to-last fence now becomes the last, the principle being that presumably horses will be less tired trying to jump the second-to-last than they would be the last.

Let's say there is an element of truth there, that works for only one fence.

There is no data to suggest the vast majority of injuries and fatalities are caused at the last obstacle.

Penalties have been increased for jockeys who fail to retire fatigued horses from races and horses must now school in front of stewards before being allowed to go to jumping trials.

But as someone pointed out in a blog on the TAB's Sport 927 radio station in Melbourne this week, schooling a horse over the tiny Victorian hurdles is like walking to the letterbox to train for a marathon.

It's the speed at which horses are being asked to take these ridiculous hurdles under race conditions that's causing the problem by tripping, not falling, and they are not the same thing. Make the fences twice as formidable and you force the horse, and rider, to slow down.

There is a sad irony at the tail of this story - the animal activists, outraged at Racing Victoria's decision, are waiting for the next fatality to press home their arguments.

The smart money won't be on Victoria's jumps racing surviving five years.