welfare evidence library • question
What is the whip for - and does it do what we say it does?
A five minute read - Asked by someone in Irish racing • Published July 2026
where this page starts
The whip is defended for good reasons, and it's worth stating them plainly.
People who support the whip say it does three jobs: it encourages the horse to give their best effort, it helps a rider steer and correct, and it keeps racing safe for horse and rider. Those three jobs aren't our summary of the argument — they're the ones set out in the British Horseracing Authority's own review of the whip, which concluded that, used correctly, "the whip stimulates a horse and should not cause pain" (BHA 2011).
Supporters believe the whip makes racing fairer and safer. Those are reasonable things to want.
So this page doesn't start by asking whether the whip should go. It starts by taking those three jobs at face value and asking a simpler question of each one:
Does the whip actually do what we want?
Everything below draws only on published evidence.
WHAT RACING ITSELF HAS CONCLUDED - British Horseracing Authority (BHA) case study
Three documents. Fifteen years. The same gap.
2011 — BHA Whip Review. Used properly, the whip stimulates rather than hurts. But the evidence is limited in places, so the Authority should keep supporting research (Recommendation 3).
2020 — Horse Welfare Board, A Life Well Lived. Reassessing the same question, racing's independently chaired welfare board found the science inconclusive. On scientific grounds it supported neither keeping the whip nor banning it, and did not settle what the whip does to a horse's performance, behaviour or body. The Board then decided against commissioning further research — measuring pain would be difficult and possibly unethical, stress findings would be subjective, and any study would take longer than the public debate would allow.
2022 — BHA Whip Consultation. The whip was retained for encouragement, with use restricted to the backhand. The report noted the evidence gaps were still there, and proposed convening researchers to discuss filling them — the same proposal that was made eleven years earlier, back in 2011.
What this sequence shows.
The 2011 Whip Review concluded the whip does not cause pain. The 2020 Horse Welfare Board concluded that science cannot say what the whip does to the horse. Both conclusions can't be right. And the research recommended in 2011, and again in 2022, still hasn't been done for reasons the Board set out clearly, including that the debate would move faster than the research could.
That raises a question and it isn't a scientific one.
Racing's position is that the evidence doesn't justify removing the whip. But the BHA equally acknowledge the evidence doesn't establish that the whip improves performance or safety either. According to the BHA's own documents, the evidence is uncertain both for and against the whip, yet so far, it has sided with keeping the whip.
So: when we don't know, who should carry the burden of proof — the horse, or the practice?
Britain recognised in law that animals are sentient beings in 2022. That doesn't answer the question, but it does make it harder to treat BHA's current answer as the obvious one.
PHYSICAL EVIDENCE
Does the whip work?
Does the whip make horses run faster?
When researchers timed races section by section, horses reached their highest speeds where the whip was not used. The whip was used most in the closing sections, when horses were already fatigued — that is, when they had least left to give (Evans & McGreevy, 2011).
Does it improve steering, reduce interference, or make racing safer?
Whip-free races (where jockeys hold the whip but don't use it) were compared with ordinary whip-permitted races across 126 races and 1,178 starters. There was no difference in steering, interference, incidents, or finishing times (Thompson et al., 2020).
On safety, the evidence goes further than "no benefit."
Whip use has been linked to horse falls in jumps racing (Pinchbeck et al., 2004) and to fatal leg fracture (Parkin et al., 2006).
If the whip were truly essential, the rules would agree with each other — and they don't.
Norway allows the whip only for genuine safety, not for encouragement. Japan and most US states set no numerical limit and leave it to the rider's discretion. Britain and Ireland sit in between, capping the number of strikes. A tool that were genuinely critical to a fair or safe race wouldn't be regulated in half a dozen contradictory ways across the racing world (see Table 1 and Table 2).
The distinction that matters
There is a sound reason for a rider to be able to correct a horse who is ducking or veering into danger — and the evidence doesn't argue with that. It's exactly why the countries that have moved away from the whip — Norway, Sweden, Denmark — still let riders carry one for genuine safety.
The line the evidence draws is between two different uses:
- the whip for safety correction — a narrow, defensible use, and
- the whip for encouragement — striking a horse to make them run faster or try harder.
Every finding on this page is about encouragement.
Encouragement is the practice with no measured benefit — and, as the rest of the page shows, a measurable cost to the horse...and the industry.
What the whip does to the horse's body
The padded whip is often assumed to protect the horse. Frame-by-frame analysis of race footage found this isn't reliable: a visible indentation appeared on the horse in 83% of strikes, and the unpadded section of the whip made contact 64% of the time (McGreevy et al., 2012). Padding doesn't dependably prevent contact or impact.
Table 1
Table 2
MENTAL-STATE EVIDENCE - what the horse experiences
What does the horse feel?
A common and reasonable-sounding argument is that a horse's skin is thick, so a padded whip can't really hurt them. It's worth testing directly.
Horse skin and human skin have the same density of nerve endings in the layer that detects pain, and the outer skin is no thicker where horses are struck (Tong et al., 2020). The physical basis for "they don't feel it the way we would" doesn't hold up.
The science is increasingly settled that horses experience pain:
Horses are sentient and experience pain (Cambridge Declaration 2012 ; NY Declaration on Animal Consciousness 2024).
Pain is defined as: "an unpleasant sensory and emotional experience associated with, or resembling that associated with, actual or potential tissue damage." (International Society for Equitation Science 2026)
Assessing pain in animals has been part of science for over 80 years (Broom, 2001).
A horse showing no obvious reaction is not evidence of no pain (Shutt 1987; Broom, 2001).
The equine pain face is a validated tool for recognising pain in horses (Gleerup 2015).
But isn't the science on the whip inconclusive?
This is the most common response, and it comes from racing's own welfare board, so it deserves a straight answer.
"Inconclusive" describes the state of the evidence. It does not describe the horse.
Two different questions often get put together.
The first question is whether we can measure what a horse feels when struck. That is genuinely hard, and the Horse Welfare Board was right that a study designed to measure pain in a horse raises ethical problems.
The second question is whether the whip does the jobs it is defended for. That question has been studied — on speed, on steering, on interference, on finishing times — and the answers are in the Physical Evidence section above.
So the honest response is not that everything is unknown. The harder question about measuring what a horse feels is unresolved. The easier one has been answered, and on every measure tested, the whip did not deliver what it is credited with.
Language is doing important work here too. Regulators describe striking a horse as "encouragement" — a word that carefully steps around what the horse is experiencing (Uldahl & Mellor 2025). "Inconclusive" does something similar. Both describe the practice from outside, in terms that leave out the horse.
And on the unresolved question, one thing is settled: a horse showing no obvious reaction is not evidence of no pain (Shutt, 1987; Broom, 2001). Absence of proof and proof of absence are different things.
Image provided by http://horseracingphoto.co.uk
Image used with permission © Emma Preikschat
Horse showing few signs of pain (Equine Pain Face)
Horse showing several signs of pain (Equine Pain Face)
SOCIAL EVIDENCE - what a practice means
What has racing itself concluded?
Padded whips came in for British racing in 2009. The 2011 Review recommended cutting the permitted number of uses. In 2022 the BHA rules changed again, limiting use for encouragement to the backhand.
Each of those changes was made in good faith by people trying to improve things. But regulators don't keep restricting a practice they believe the public is comfortable with. Racing's own rulebook is the clearest available record that the discomfort is real, and that racing knows it.
The sport's own welfare body went further. In 2020 the Horse Welfare Board — independently chaired, reporting to the BHA — set the position that racing should lead discussions about "the future removal of the whip for encouragement." Two years later, the consultation kept it.
That gap isn't between racing and its critics. It's inside racing.
What does the public see?
What the image carries.
Whipping has a long cultural history as an instrument of coercion — over enslaved people, and over animals as a means of domination (Wadiwel 2013). Whatever a given spectator consciously thinks, that inheritance is what the gesture carries. Changing Rein's own analysis of equestrian language finds the horse constructed as equipment to be operated rather than a partner to be worked with, and striking a horse to make him run faster is that construction made visible (Luke 2026).
What people say when asked
In a nationally representative survey of 1,533 Australians, 75% opposed the use of whips in racing (McGreevy 2018). This study also found men were more likely to support whipping than women — an important finding when reflecting on the make up of most racing boards and the predominance of men in general in racing. The more often a person attended or gambled on racing, the more likely they were to support whip use.
The gap between groups matters as much as the headline number: just 10% of people who don't attend or bet on racing support the whip compared with 37% of racing followers (McGreevy 2018). An industry whose participants find routine what the wider public finds objectionable is describing the precondition for a social licence shock, not a communications problem.
When the same act is judged outside the racing frame
In August 2025 the Devonport Magistrates Court convicted a Tasmanian racehorse trainer of animal cruelty under the Animal Welfare Act 1993 (Tas) for striking a horse more than 40 times with a padded racing whip, off-course, in an incident captured on CCTV. In sentencing, the Court described the horse as restrained by a bridle and vulnerable, the conduct as deliberate and involving multiple applications of force, and the pain and suffering caused as moderate to severe. The Court also noted shifting community attitudes towards animal cruelty. The conviction does not establish that whip use within the Rules of Racing is unlawful, and we do not cite it for that. Its significance is that a court applying ordinary anti-cruelty law to the padded racing whip used the vocabulary of pain, vulnerability and deliberate force — the same vocabulary the public uses when watching a race. The whip did not change at the racecourse gate; the regulatory frame around the horse did (RSPCA).
What the industry's own conduct concedes
Racing has restricted the whip repeatedly and in mostly one direction: padding mandated in 2009, strike limits progressively tightened, and formal review of whip use undertaken by the British Horseracing Authority. Regulators do not repeatedly restrict a practice they believe the public accepts. Each restriction is an admission that the previous position had become indefensible — and each has been followed by continued public objection rather than settlement.
When a horse is hit to win a race, it signals that the animal is treated as equipment rather than a partner (Luke et al., 2026). And representative surveys find that many — by some measures, most — people do not support whipping horses (World Horse Welfare / Voconiq, 2024; Wilson et al., 2021).
The fear that ending the whip would drive punters away isn't borne out. Few racing followers say they'd stop betting if the whip were banned (Wilson et al., 2021) — which matches the lived experience of Norway, Sweden and Denmark, where whip-free racing has carried on without losing its betting or its competitiveness. REF
"Does it (the whip) look good? Definitely not."
Where that leaves us
None of this tells racing what it should value — that isn't what evidence does.
What it can do is test the reasons the whip is usually defended on. The studies here found no benefit from striking a horse for encouragement. Nor does the research show benefit in terms of steering, safety or reduced interference. On the horse's side of it, the research found contact and indentation on the horse's body, and an animal well equipped to feel pain from both.
Racing has also considered, and rejected, the argument that uncertainty itself should prompt caution. Veterinary and welfare groups responding to the 2022 consultation argued for the precautionary principle — act protectively while the evidence is unsettled. A majority of the Steering Group judged that disproportionate, given a whip designed and regulated to limit harm, and the scope for further reform. That is a reasonable position, honestly reached. It is also a choice, and worth naming as one.
Which leaves the question the sport keeps arriving at. Not whether racing could continue without the whip (Norway settled that decades ago) but why, when the whip doesn't do what we say it does, we still reach for it?