Six animal-welfare campaigners have been cleared of causing a public nuisance over protests they staged at the Grand National.
Nine activists climbed perimeter fences at Aintree in 2023 and went onto the track to demonstrate against the staging of the race.
Some attached themselves to jumps as part of the protest, bringing the racecourse to a standstill and delaying the start.
Others tried to glue themselves to security fencing around the track, but were led away by police.
Officers arrested 118 people over disruption for what they said were criminal damage and public nuisance offences.
The protesters claimed racing inflicted cruelty on horses through gruelling training, whipping and painful injuries.
Monitoring since 2007 by Animal Aid suggests that at least 3,071 horses have died on UK racecourses. Three died at the Grand National in 2023, and a fourth later allegedly died from an infection following an injury there.
At Liverpool Crown Court on Wednesday, the six members of campaign organisation Animal Rising, who had denied causing a public nuisance, were found not guilty by unanimous jury verdicts.
A key defence was “reasonable excuse”, a provision of public nuisance law. The defendants argued that the suffering and deaths of horses justified their actions.
Animal Rising said the result showed 12 randomly selected members of the public agreed that “disrupting a race to try to prevent horses from coming to harm” was not a crime.
Horses have to jump fences 30 times along the four-mile route of the Grand National course.
Sarah McCaffrey, 22, from Glasgow, who was one of those cleared, said: “Over 450 horses have been killed at the races since we tried to halt the Grand National.
“As a nation of animal lovers, we recognise horses as intelligent, beautiful and complex individuals. Yet they are treated as objects to profit from, exploit and then discard when they have served their purpose.”
She called on secretary of state for sport, Lisa Nandy, to ban horse racing.
It was the first of five Grand National crown court cases, in which 23 other Animal Rising activists face trial for causing a public nuisance. Another trial begins on Monday.
