I'm not sure if I got my English terms correctly, but I assume "trot racing" is "raviurheilu" in Finnish - a popular form of horse competition, where trotters run a race with a driver sitting on a lightweight cart.

Well, personally I'm not that interested in any forms or racing - but I have nothing against it if other people are interested in things I'm not =) And that's about it. Generally speaking, I think we can't simply say "trot racing is bad" or "trot racing is good" - I know that it can be done is so many different ways. In the racing world there are some people who mistreat their horses, just to get maximum effort from the horse, even if it means using non-humane methods and causing un-necessary injuries and pain to the horse. And sadly enough, we can find this kind of people in nearly every field of working with animals. Similarly, I know there are a lot of good, talented and humane professionals out there, treating their horses with dignity. And to me that also seems to be a best way to win a race. A healthy horse willing to race is much more likely to win the race than a badly treated horse who runs just because he is scared and afraid.

Also, I'd guess that it was trot racing which kept the Finnhorse breed alive. In the post-war era a lot of work was still done with the horses. But when people could afford tractors, horse population declined. My uncle was one among the last stubborn horse-men who continued to haul timber with a horse - he was working in such terrains where machines couldn't go. Apart from a small bunch of that kind of die-hard horse people folks just changed their animals to machines. But some of the fastest horses were kept for trot racing, as it was (and still is) a popular form of sport. The gene-pool of Finnhorse narrowed down, as people were mostly breeding for good runners. But in the past decades there has been a rise in other ways of using Finnhorse, so now the situation seems to be slightly better. (And I assume Ruunaamaton sure knows all this, I just wanted to write briefly for the foreign readers.) So, this is another reason why I respect trot racing. Without it the whole Finnhorse breed might have been vanished by now.