The Coastal Horse Care Unit (CHCU) is a Section 21 company whose mission is to protect horses from abuse and alleviate their suffering by rehabilitating, campaigning and educating. Their main objective is the welfare and care of horses and associated with this objective is the transfer of skills to disadvantaged rural communities to assist and educate rural communities to care for their horses.
Gold Circle is a major financial contributor to the Coastal Horse Care Unit and also assists the organization to raise funds towards their various initiatives. Gold Circle is continuously embarking on projects that support and develop traditional racing, thereby informing and integrating a culture of horse care and welfare amongst rural communities. In partnership with Coastal Horse Care Unit, Gold Circle started a Rural Outreach initiative called “Empowering Equine Communities through Service”. The aim is to help educate rural communities on how to better take care of their horses which are used for racing, transport, herding and leisure. These programs highlight the racing industry and are an encouragement to horse owners to enhance their knowledge and skills to a more professional platform.
Gold Circle is actively involved in these community based programmes to support equine welfare in rural areas. In this regard the company volunteers its personnel to undertake, together with the Coastal Horse Care Unit, various clinics and workshops within rural communities to allow skills transfer and to educate horse owners to care for their animals. These communities rely heavily on their horses for their transport and livelihood. The program offered not only teaches them the basics of horse care but provides them with the tools to gain better productivity from the animals in a conducive environment which is both horse and owner friendly.
The most recent clinic took place at Endumeni and Nquthu in Dundee between the 27th to the 29th May 2021. The team comprised CHCU, Gold Circle, the National Horse Racing Authority (NHRA) and Professor Alan Guthrie, who is the Director of the Equine Research Centre at the University of Pretoria. The main aim of this clinic was to treat, register, vaccinate and microchip rural race horses so as to better develop and regulate rural racing. 209 horses were vaccinated and 57 horses were microchipped.
Due to Covid-19 lockdown and protocol measures, there were no outreach programmes or clinics held for some time and it was noted that the condition of some of the more popular race horses had deteriorated since the last clinic visit. Whilst the Professor and his assistant carried out the microchipping and CHCU carried out the vaccinating, Gold Circle staff played a supportive role which included:
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Assisting with translations;
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Ensuring that Covid-19 protocols of sanitising and wearing of masks were adhered to and
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Securing the horses during vaccinating and chipping
The team also interacted with the Community, in particular children who play a key role in caring for horses. It is well known that the passion and love for horses generally emanates from an early age, even with thoroughbred racing, and clearly the same holds true with rural horses as well.
Skills development amongst the youth in particular, must continue in order for rural communities to progress the relationship between man and horse and Gold Circle will continue to remain involved in such projects.
The next clinic will be on the 18th to 19th June 2021 in Alfred Duma, Escort and Injisuthi districts.
