Together with the Coalition for Protection of Racehorses, Greens spokesperson for Animal Welfare, Senator Mehreen Faruqi, has written to Schweppes Australia and their parent company, Asahi Beverages, urging them to drop their sponsorship of the Melbourne Cup Carnival.
The Melbourne Cup is a grotesque festival of animal cruelty, consumerism, alcoholism, and gambling, resulting in harm to animals and society. Year after year, we see the painful deaths and horrible suffering of horses at the hands of the brutal racing industry.
Sponsoring all this horror is your Schweppes lemonade.
Schweppes Australia is a loud sponsor of the Melbourne Cup Carnival. Its very own Schweppervescence Plate race will be run on Cup day. Even more disturbingly, this race is for 3 year old horses, despite horses’ bodies not being skeletally mature until five years of age.
A horse is killed on Australian racetracks every 2 days from racing-related injuries. This does not even account for the thousands killed off the track and the horses that disappear from the records each year.
In the past year, on the very same days where Schweppes sponsored races, three horses were killed on Australian racetracks:
On 18 April 2026, 6 year old Suspicious Time died from a heart attack.
On 11 April 2026, 8 year old Kerman Rock collapsed and died after passing the finish line.
On 4 November 2025, 4 year old Rothfury suffered a catastrophic injury and was subsequently killed in front of racegoers.
In 2015, Schweppes Australia showed courage and compassion in its decision to completely cut ties with the greyhound racing industry. At the time they said they were ‘shocked and appalled’ by the cruelty. The same courage and compassion must be shown again for horses.
Send the letter if you agree: https://senatorfaruqi.good.do/schweppes-melb-cup/nup-to-the-cup-schweppes-26/