Reconsidering Umamusume in the context of animal abuse

20 Dec, 2025

Preliminary note: this post was half-written back in July 2025, a moment during which I ended up switching gears and tackling other difficult topics as fan of a given work of fiction. I resumed writing this post on a whim a week ago. I have found out only now, the day before posting, that coincidentally the US-based animal welfare organisation PETA had tried criticizing the Umamusume franchise around a week ago too - through a tweet that was met with a colossal amount of backlash. I am not from the US, barely know PETA, and the motivation behind this post is unrelated, even if its theme is similar. I touch upon this drama a little bit more near the end, but otherwise do my own thing.

Second preliminary note: if you are a fan of Umamusume, this may be a difficult read. I do not want to attack the love you may have for the franchise or the characters; but if you read on, I will necessarily advocate for you to reconsider the franchise itself, in light of what I explain below. Please take care of yourself while reading, and take the time you need to do so.

Introduction to Umamusume

I first heard about Umamusume when checking for the spring 2025 animes on Anime Feminist. Finding some particularly enthusiastic review by Cy Catwell about cute horse girls with odd names racing in a high-stake sports anime, I was... confused. "Horse anime girls who are physically capable of running very fast, eager to do so, and a whole competitive universe is built around their physical feats" was definitely an outlandish concept, and it was very clear that it was made to drag me into an entire franchise of cute girls running and doing their best.
But, taken in by the reviewer's enthusiasm, I decided to give the horsegirls a chance. And at first, I did not regret it at all.

I started watching the series airing at that time, Umamusume: Cinderella Gray - apparently a spinoff of the franchise's main series, Umamusume: Pretty Derby, which had aired from 2018 to 2023 (and that I had somehow never heard about). With this, I quickly understood the joy these media about horse girls could bring to someone. First, because the characters were genuinely charming and fun in their interactions, and a bit yuri at that. Second, because this was a definitely bizarre, yes, but also a really good sports anime. I couldn't help but root for the lovable underdog (underhorse...?) protagonist - the deadpan, big-eater, hell-bent-on-running Oguri Cap - and her circle of friends and rivals. The humor worked well, and the actual tension about the running competitions too.

All this required shutting my mind a bit to all the weird things this horse girls universe could imply, both in its worldbuilding and even its premise. Once again, it also required accepting the obvious fact that somewhere in there, the franchise was made to grab my attention using cute girls with animal features (and, expectedly for marketing reasons, only girls). Additionally, even if that aspect took more of a backseat in the spinoff I was watching, I also came to understand that there was some kind of idol performance to the characters, too, with each race's winner performing catchy songs and choreographies.
Yet, even if the sum of all this felt like a whole bingo of things made purposefully to draw a big audience... it didn't feel sloppy in its execution at all, and I was impressed.

On the contrary, what could have just been a dreadful marketing cocktail actually felt... earnest? Somewhere in the characters and their design, and the sports shounen aspect of getting better and better and believing in your friends' support, it was a series that wholeheartedly embraced its bizarre concept and literally ran with it. It was, surprisingly and despite my reservations, really good, if still perfectly outlandish.
I mean, it definitely played into that tendency to animegirlify anything and everything because that made money. And sure, "horses are good for racing" was probably the inception to this franchise, and it embarrassingly echoed horse racing. But using that core idea to actually write an actual sports anime about girls (who just also happen to kinda be horses) running races... heh. Why not, if the end product was endearing?

The picture starts to sour

... But as I ended Umamusume: Cinderella Gray at the beginning of summer, I learned something vital I had somehow not known before that point: the odd names that the characters had were the names of real-life racehorses. Their color schemes and character designs were based on those horses and their various jockeys. And even more striking, the actual events taking place in the series mirrored the composition and outcomes of real-life horse races - not just the names and locations, but also who won when.
This series was a reenactment of horse races that had taken place in real life, with an anime girl veneer.

On most platforms where people tend to point out this connection to actual horse races, this is met with amazement: this series is not just a sports anime, but a tribute to a deep love for horse racing!!
And this is the part where I start feeling sick to my stomach.

Because yes, "horse racing but cute anime girls racing" is one hell of an elevator pitch. If you don't dwell more than a few seconds on the "horse racing" part, and what it implies. This may be a tough pill to swallow if you are invested in Umamusume, but let's start with this: horse racing is animal abuse.

On horse racing

Horse racing is often presented and traditionally seen as as a "sport", and alright: it is a (dangerous) sport for the running jockeys, as it requires specific athletics and training. And it is a specific kind of athletics and training for horses too. But the horses never consent to this: they are forced into it. This is no sport to them.

One of the usual justifications behind horse racing is that the horses do consent in their own way. Something along the lines of "horses run because it's in their nature, and they enjoy this; and if a horse really doesn't want to run, we won't force them". But this rings absurdly hollow when we consider the conditions under which they run (or any analysis of signs of stress or trauma in racehorses, for that matter).
Horses are whipped to be forced to run in races under most regulations¹. The more skittish ones are also cornered into their starting gates, when they are reluctant to position themselves. Most are killed when they don't make for either a good runner, or a good breeder - that is, when then don't die running in competitions or during training.
I can't stress enough how different this is from herds of horses running together.

And even in the cases where horses seem to demonstrate some kind of impatience to run in a given race, or run without whips under certain regulations, I need to repeat that this is not consent. You cannot consent under duress. You cannot consent when you were born into horse racing, purposefully bred for this, and trained only for it starting way before maturity.

Horse racing is not as inherently a life or death situation as, say, the atrocious things that are bullfighting or dogfighting. But at its core, it also mistreats and coerces animals into extremely demanding competitions without their consent, breeds them specifically for that, trains them way too young to do so, and kills off the ones that don't perform well. It also has its own doping scandals, once again on horses who obviously never consented to this.

Ultimately, horse racing leads to an absurd amount of injuries and deaths, from all these factors. Deaths during races are just the tip of that iceberg; but still, I encourage you to take a peek at the website horsedeathwatch, which monitors in real time the death of racehorses: there is approximately one horse dead every two days, and this is only considering deaths on course. It doesn't take into account training injuries, sickness from general stress and bad living conditions, or all the horses considered "wastage" - this is the official term!! - and eliminated.
Horse racing effectively hinges on literal eugenics to produce "racers" - who are traumatized in various ways then used for reproduction - while slaughtering the rest of them... all this for a multi-billion dollar industry for human betting and entertainment (we'll get back to that).

Even some pro-horse-racing websites tend to recognize how horrible horse racing conditions often are for the horses²; and that the fate that awaits most horses deemed unfit to race is the slaughterhouse, and how grim that is. I just can't agree with them trying to find better regulations for horse racing, because its system is fundamentally based on the exploitation of nonconsenting animals who feel pain. We will talk about this later, but I believe such a system cannot be reformed, and it should be ended no matter how financially juicy and/or beloved it is.

That "financially juicy" part is also some horror in itself, of course. First, because horse racing has extremely strong ties with gambling, and notably gambling addictions; it is a lucrative business partly based on inducing addiction in humans and made from abusing animals. It's really that horrible.
Second, because horse racing has always had historical ties with class privilege: its name is "the sport of kings" for a reason. Owning horses has always been a social marker for a particular brand of wealthy people. Overall, making millions and billions over the suffering of animals (and possibly the impoverishment of others from the aforementioned business inciting to gambling) feels at odds with everything I stand for, and I really hope you too.

On that topic, did you know that the CEO of CyberAgent, the advertising company behind Cygames, the studio responsible for the Umamusume franchise, was a horse racing fan who owned several racehorses? I'll just, huh... put that here.

Systemic abuse and Umamusume's contribution

Now, a very common pro-horse-racing counterargument is how well-treated and beloved some retired racehorses can be. This is true to some extent - and it is particularly heard in the context of Umamusume, because the franchise has indeed had a net positive impact on some fan-favorite real-life horses who inspired their horsegirl counterparts, as they saw an affluence of fan donations. But this really feels like slapping a bandage onto an open wound.
Yes, Umamusume significantly improved the living conditions of several retired racing horses. But how many of them die for this? These isolated actions are far from eliminating the usual training conditions of most horses, be they the near-constant enclosing in stalls, the training while immature, the use of whips, the slaughtering of "unfit" horses, doping, or general bad training or retirement conditions. And even if it did, hypothetically, even if we did successfully manage to eliminate all of these mistreatments somehow, we would still have horses trained for human entertainment into a highly dangerous activity they never consented to. And this is already a problem. It has to end in the first place, the same way animals in circuses should not be acceptable anymore for instance.

But the crux of all this is that all of these mistreatments are systemic. Racehorses are literal chattel and property of humans by law - and often regularly transit from one owner to the next. Deprived of most rights and consideration as actual sentient beings, and raised in an environment full of competitive and financial pressure, they will be abused. Their consent is unimportant and their pain optional - else they simply wouldn't be put through any of this.
This is speciesism: the notion that a (nonhuman) animal's well-being and consent and life are negotiable, negligible, or inferior to humans' - even to humans' pleasure and entertainment. It is an awfully under-discussed topic because we put into place a ton of mechanisms to cope with the cognitive dissonance of "loving animals" yet mistreating other animals daily. It's extremely hard to look at that dissonance and admit to it. It's distressing and upsetting. But we need to do so.

If the goal is to eliminate as much as possible pain in other animals, the only true solution regarding horse racing is to end it. Anything that benefits horses in horse racing would benefit them more if the horse racing part was removed.
(How to effectively do that is a whole other thing - dismantling a lucrative system of abuse is really hard - but if you do not agree with me on this in the first place, reading the rest of this post probably won't do you any good.)

With all this unpacked, we can really go back to Umamusume.
Horse racing has been declining overall in the past few decades, with an aging audience and a global population overall more aware of the cruelty of animals' treatment for human entertainment (as evidenced by the growing end of dogfighting and controversies around bullfighting, for instance). Yet Umamusume has been directly contributing to the revitalization of horse racing, and to making younger people interested in it; and no matter its positive impact on specific horses, this strengthens an overall cruel industry. Heck, Umamusume's financial ties with horse racing are clear: it sponsored the 2024 Breeders' Cup and the 2025 Kentucky Derby, among other races; and it has direct legal and financial ties with the owners of the various horses featured in the franchise.

On that topic, I really recommend reading this 2023 article on Anime Herald by Rita Wenxin Wang: it underlines well how the Umamusume franchise is overall much more upbeat than what happens to real-life horses in most cases, even with the support it manages to garner around specific racehorses. The same article also warns about Umamusume's pipeline to gambling, both in real life and considering how the franchise also developed a gacha game - a game which was in fact its initial project, even if its main anime series ended up airing before it.

That same gacha game hit its English release this Spring, and has been since then everywhere I've looked, from ads to VTubers streaming it to analysis and recommendation videos. And this made me realize in full how much of a marketing juggernaut the franchise was, and how much it actually referenced and encouraged interest in horse racing.
Once again, I really recommend this article from the AV Club by Grace Benfell. It unpacks how predatory the game's economic model is, just as gacha games are in general, but with the extra resonance of being based on an activity with heavy ties to gambling. It also analyzes very accurately how its way of turning real-life horses into collectible idol anime girls contributes to the horses' commodification and their disposability. Indeed, the anime girls from Umamusume do not just share their names with real-life racehorses: they are, in the Umamusume lore, literal reincarnations of them. And so, in that same scenario, abused horses are turned into anime girls to be added to your collection and forever meant to be running - their image connected to racing and exploited even in death.

And this is... this is nightmarish.

Umamusume's "humanization" of the horses: the heart of the problem

To be clear, the problem with Umamusume is not its preposterous concept of a whole universe centered on horse girls who want to race - it is preposterous, and that's almost part of the fun when taken on its own. The problem is how everything in that concept sanitizes actual abuse.
Umamusume romanticizes horse racing notably because it makes it look like a cool sports shounen. For instance, there is no gambling to its setting, at least not in the way gambling is front and center in horse racing. You do not bet on young girls who run: no, that financial aspect is removed from the in-universe premise (after all, it is already a meta part of the gacha mechanic in the first place). And so the franchise can focus on having a purely "sports manga" message: training harder, and doing your best through healthy rivalry and increasingly stronger opponents.

To me, the most terrifying aspect of Umamusume is this subtle shift in perspective, this oh-so-telling twist in its worldbuilding. Umamusume distances itself from the original concept of horse racing in just the right way: it turns horses forced to run for money into anime girls eager to run for the love of racing. The horsegirl races are entirely identical to real-life human races, aside from the horse tidbits - you race of your own volition and train to become the best runner. You have (some) agency over your career.
Except actual horse races aren't that at all.

But even worse: by having the girls being literal reincarnation of the racehorses they bear the name of, and having the outcome of each race mirroring/retelling an actual race that happened in real life, the universe of Umamusume does not just invent a context where horsegirls racing is consensual, with agency from the runners³. By blurring the line between the horsegirl and her horse counterpart, Umamusume literally rewrites the story behind real-life horse races by making as if the horses chose to run in those competitions. It invites the fans to celebrate the actual horses' victories as sportspersons with agency, and in doing so erases any possibility to see them as they are really treated: deprived of consent, forced to run, unaware that they have won anything. The pride that a horsegirl from Umamusume feels when winning a competition, the determination she puts into it, all of those are fabricated emotions projected by the audience onto real horses - seen as athletes, but in actuality exploited at will. Paradoxically, the horses are humanized in a way that makes their actual nonhuman circumstances invisible. And this is nauseating.

Refusing this vision of racehorses as athletes is both vital and extremely difficult when you get hooked on Umamusume, because it demands tearing the whole pretense of the franchise apart. This is a narrative that probably already exists within a larger horse racing audience; but Umamusume makes it explicit yet imperceptible at the same time. Its idol-like aspect also contributes to this: if you see a horse as a dedicated, famous star who wants to pursue her dreams, you'll be less likely to realize that they are exploited and without agency. It's really vicious.

To see horse racing as it is, as a system of animal cruelty (no matter any individual intent at treating your racehorses better) maintained for human entertainment and for money, is so sickening it's easier to shut your eyes to it. And when you consider that Umamusume is an additional layer of human entertainment built on the suffering of animals, erasing that suffering at the same time... well, it really fucking hurts.
But leaving some room for accepting that hurt instead of staying in denial is the right thing to do.

And I mean, I was naive too at first. I really thought it was all just loosely based on horse racing, for inspiration. We all use the protective mechanisms we can against this violence.
But we need to be aware of it at some point. Umamusume as a franchise has very real consequences, which are mostly making an industry that directly profits from animal abuse flourish, and we should not shrug that off.

And, yeah, I know. Despite all this, on some level, a lot of love is still poured into the Umamusume franchise, somehow - in the character designs, in the animation, even on some level in the tributes to well-known racehorses. I do not aim to minimize that.
But that love is not just misplaced; it is used on purpose to make a lot of money and keep the system afloat. It creates a fanbase that operates against the only actual solution drastically improving the well-being of horses: getting them out of the horse racing industry. If Umamusume loved its horses as much as it seems to, it would work to free them from this instead of, you know, sponsoring races (and getting its CEO money for buying more horses).
But Umamusume loves its horses as symbols. As short-lived yet eternal stars. As brave little athletes (who will win big). Not as the sentient beings deprived of choice that they are.

Some words on the controversy surrounding PETA

As evidence of the problem around the "humanization" of the horses, I need to insert here a short mention of the ongoing drama surrounding the animal welfare organization PETA.

First thing first: I didn't know any of this, as I am not from the US, but I discovered PETA had accumulated a lot of ugly history over its years of existence, from a scarily high euthanasia rate in its animal shelters, to hurtful references to the Holocaust or slavery in order to defend animal rights, by the way of a fearmongering campaign around dairy products "causing autism". Let me be clear, and notably as an autistic person: fuck all that. Wow.

I am not here to defend PETA. But I support animal rights, and in this particular case I find the general reactions to PETA's recent tweet about Umamusume particularly telling: all of them are either directly criticizing the organization's hurtful past campaigns and failings at actually improving animal welfare; or insisting on how respectful and loving Umamusume is in the tributes to its real-life equine inspirations, "contrary to PETA's depiction". None of them, crucially, addresses the point of the initial tweet, albeit that point is made in a provocative and roundabout way: the fact that horse racing is animal abuse.

The first of these two responses is a classic kind of counterargument: if you can't engage with the substance, criticize the form. PETA has done some horrible things - therefore who are they to talk in this particular topic?! Let's dig out all of the bodies they have buried in the back yard instead.
Such a reaction, if somewhat understandable in its intensity considering said buried bodies, is sheer misdirection, if often unconsciously. Denouncing an organization that supposedly champions animal rights for its failures makes you feel better and helps you not think about how you treat animals yourself - including how you may give money to a franchise that directly supports horse racing. This same reaction also uses a background feeling against animal welfare organizations that most of the population seems to hold: the idea that they are killjoys. This protects you from having to put your own morals into question⁴. But animal rights is a right cause, and horrors like PETA's management should not make you feel disdain for that cause - but instead a deep-seated "how can we do better?".

The second kind of response to this whole drama is the one I talked about before: pointing out the grief, respect and esteem horse racing and Umamusume have for their legendary horse figures, and oppose to it the "disrespect" PETA displays with its tweet⁵. Here is what I find a shocking example full of that feeling: it presents how heroically Silence Suzuka, the horse depicted, saved his jockey's life; how his presence is still felt and admired and was faithfully portrayed in the Umamusume franchise; and how he inspired generations. All this while sneering at those pesky vegans who wear "polyurethane leather boots" and talking of all the good that Umamusume did for horse racing that PETA did not.
This is exactly the kind of reaction that fails to see horse racing as a cruel system that Umamusume contributes to strengthen - a system which is precisely why those horses die in the first place. It hinges on seeing the racehorses as stars who are fondly remembered and should be respected as such, instead of animals abused most of their life (if not their entire life, depending on their retirement conditions for the ones who are lucky enough to survive that long).

This is everything I wanted to say here: this paradigm shift in how you see the horses is everything.

Painting their deaths as "tragedies" is the perfect parade to seeing those as the consequence of horse racing that they are. Presenting the horses as "legendary" maintains them in a status of fame they are never aware of, in a life they never consented to. "Humanizing" the horses gives them a pretense of volition while robbing them of their own agency.
It's awful.

A short comparison with dogfighting

The following is a wobbly parallel, because Pokémon is not bleak in that way - even if its capture and taming of creatures has been a topic of debate for decades, and there are definitely things to say on that matter. But imagine for a brief moment that Pokémon's cute critters were based on famous dogs from dogfighting competitions, and that the franchise was overall ripe with references to that "blood sport" and directly sponsoring its real-life tournaments. Would you buy the games? Would you see how the in-game message of "training the strongest team", full of cuter-looking fighting dogs who seemingly want to fight, erases the responsibility of the humans putting their real-life counterparts into dangerous situations they never consented to? Would you realize the atrocity of an anime scenario mirroring beat for beat the outcomes of real-life dogfights, except that in that universe they don't die and they all want this?

Once again, horse racing is not that directly bleak, because horses don't literally fight each other to death. But indirectly? It's the same idea. Jockeys do run exhausted horses to their death.
And if the only problem you find in dogfighting is that dogs kill each other, if you can't see the intrinsic problem of breeding and coercing animals for human entertainment into highly dangerous practices, then you will struggle to see the problem with horse racing - since horses' deaths can be slightly more easily framed as the "unfortunate byproduct" of demanding competitions. But it is all actually the concrete product of humans forcing them there in the first place.

That whole system hinges on the so-called "naturalness" of human owning and forcing physical feats out of other animals. But this is actually a constructed domination, which uses mechanisms of othering similar to a lot of other forms of domination. And it is a really fertile ground for ignoring the suffering of any other group of beings who can feel pain and joy.

If you believe horses brought into horse racing have any choice in the matter (that is, any other choice than balking repeatedly and therefore be put to death), I don't think I can reach you. And if you think it's ok that they don't get a choice in this, I don't think I can reach you either.
I'll say it again, but I can't force you to care. But I beg you to treat other sentient beings better.

Summary so far

If you think you care when being emotionally attached to some racehorse (through its anime girl version or not), question this care. I'll repeat myself again and again, but caring about racehorses shouldn't be admiring their physical feats as if they were stars, and seeing them as consenting athletes doing their best. It should be seeing them as they are: coerced into a highly lucrative business for human entertainment.

I'll repeat this too: horses have no idea that they are running competitions or rallying people around them, and most of them are still treated awfully throughout their life, in part because they become seen as symbols more than sentient beings with their own will negated. And I'm not counting in this all of the horses who are disposed off at any point of this process because they never reach the "caliber" of a racehorse.

And for good measure, I'll also mention again the fact that horses are still bred with the hope that the descendants of the most successful ones will inherit their speed. See for instance Oguri Cap's Wikipedia page - the protagonist of Umamusume: Cinderella Gray:
"After retirement in 1991, Oguri Cap was sent to the Yushun Stallion Station to stand stud. He was not able to produce any racers of his caliber, and in 2007 he was retired from stud duty."
This is eugenics: a notion of "good genes" which has always been tied to scientific racism and, of course, ableism.

Horse racing is rotten to the core.

So let's summarize all this as directly as possible. The Umamusume franchise:

• turns horse racing, which is a real-life industry profiting off animal abuse and heavily using eugenics, into cute anime girls willing to run;
• contributes, through its framing, to seeing horses forced to run without their consent as consenting athletes instead;
• is overall a love letter to that same real-life industry, which in turn encourages the audience's interest in it;
• finances actual horse races, and consequently directly profits off said animal abuse;
• echoes real-life gambling addiction through gacha game mechanics, and overall encourages gambling both in-game and outside of it;
• and overall, no matter the love poured into it, is a whole marketing industry that plays into the normalization of something that just shouldn't exist.

This is not just indirectly iffy. It's directly normalizing and financing animal abuse.

To the readers attached to Umamusume

To the readers attached to Umamusume: I understand. I understand how fun and engrossing it can be as a story. We do what we can with the fictions we love, and if you ever fell into the Umamusume rabbit hole, I understand how, and somewhat why. I do not want to attack how you may love or have loved Umamusume, or how its relentlessly positive outer layer may have helped you, or how you can still somewhat hold it dear despite your cognitive dissonances regarding its ties to ugly real-life issues.

But please, please, do not inject any of your money into something that contributes this greatly to animal cruelty. Umamusume is the tip of an animal abuse iceberg, and it's had a direct influence on its success and normalization and perceived innocuousness.

I can't tell you "don't enjoy anything Umamusume under any circumstances": sometimes you find the joy you can in the media that resonate with you, and it is always hard to forsake those media entirely. But you have to take a step back and be aware of the franchise's underlying structural system of coercion of sentient beings. And to come to this conclusion, one way or another:
Horse racing should not exist; and therefore, Umamusume should not exist either.

Umamusume should not exist

I will write this again: Umamusume should not exist, because horse racing should not exist. But horse racing does, and so does Umamusume. So, a better approach is: what can we do?

Once again, the first obvious answer is: not giving any money to something that supports this directly a narrative that twists animal abuse into the usual sports anime camaraderie. Ideally, not promoting it, either. And if you really need to be enthusiastic about something related to Umamusume, be transparent about the animal abuse it feeds into.

Me, I am boiling with anger. I just want to stand and fight until the horse racing industry is no more. I have no power to effectively do that; but I can at least try and tell you to stay clear of it and its multi-billion dollar anime offspring, and to fight with me.

It's hard to voice this - particularly in the current landscape where many Umamusume fans have felt attacked about something they loved and have angry knee-jerk reactions against all this.
But more generally, it's always hard to be vocal about animal rights. Most people don't want to hear that something they are doing is morally wrong; it's always easier to belittle whoever is trying to explain that. And there's a lot to do about animals considering the simply atrocious ways our current societies treat them (but also how we've always treated them in general).

So, educate yourself about speciesism. If you can, protest against unfair treatment toward animals. Donate to antispeciesist associations or organizations (probably not PETA - but you can find one near you).

Just like becoming aware of any kind of oppression, any form of domination, caring about animal rights is a slow process - it hurts to unpack it sometimes, to shed off the comfortable privilege of denial. But it matters. It has a real impact. On the life of horses in the present case; on animals in general. And how we treat other sentient beings has important repercussions on the people we become, and the societies we shape.

I can't force you to care. But I hope you will.

#essay #horrifying real world stuff