Racing received a rare gulp of oxygen from mainstream television when BBC1's The One Show shadowed the preparation of McKelvey for this year's Grand National. No wonder the sport's wider reaction to that horse's death at Aintree last Saturday was to fear the wrong gas had been administered. But did it wholly backfire?

McKelvey was the sole fatality from 40 runners. He unseated his jockey due to an error at the twentieth fence, jumped the next riderless and ran into the adjacent barrier, where it appears he fractured his back. Once trainer Peter Bowen had rushed to his side, he was put down on the advice of on-site vets, who attended to him within one minute of his accident.

The One Show had followed McKelvey's recovery from the leg injury he sustained when finishing second in last year's National. Vets initially said he would never race again, but the Bowen team nursed him through a meticulous programme of rehabilitation. Viewers could check on his progress via a “stable cam” in his box.

Monday's programme began with a discussion about McKelvey's death. Adrian Chiles, one of the presenters, revealed they had received about 500 emails, “a lot on a single subject”. Two-thirds were “extremely sympathetic” and a third were “rather angry”. The thrust of the latter group was, said Chiles: “What do you expect? You enter a horse in one of the world's most dangerous steeplechases. Horses die there.”

Clare Balding, the BBC sports presenter, responded well. “Nobody trains or owns a horse thinking it is going to die one day. You know it might happen. It might happen to any one of us or to any animal, but you don't go into it with that intention,” she said. “The race has risk but it is not cruel. Cruelty is something you inflict with purpose.”

The debate would have benefited from a description of the forensic analysis by the sport's authorities of the circumstances of all injuries in an effort to minimise avoidable risk. McKelvey's fate has lent urgency to the RSPCA's call for Aintree to provide an escape route for loose horses in that section of the course. Perhaps out-riders would also help.

But it is encouraging that the positive emails outnumbered 2:1 the negative. Anger and complaint are highly effective spurs to action. It would be interesting to discover what proportion of the correspondents had regularly viewed McKelvey's recovery, as opposed to those who found that his death upheld their untested prejudices.

Bowen has been flooded with emails via his own website, all of them sympathetic. The British Horseracing Authority has received just one on the subject, highly negative in tone. It contained a comparison of racing to bear-baiting, an analogy that has been made by the animal rights group, Animal Aid.

Animal Aid want racing banned. They denied this on Radio 5 Live last week, but have admitted it previously. Their annual National-focused campaign has altered little in ten years, yet the race has been greatly modernised in that time. Indeed it seems they care little for detail: initially they claimed McKelvey had not run this season and had died from a fall.

More alarmingly, one national Sunday newspaper was happy to quote Andrew Tyler, an Animal Aid spokesman, repeating the former error and claiming McKelvey “could not have possibly recovered” from last year's injury, thus implying it contributed to his death.

In fact, it was unconnected and McKelvey was certified fit to compete by more than one vet, all of whom examined him. Tyler, who has no known veterinary experience, has not examined the horse.

These minutiae are important because they let slip an underlying indifference to fact in favour of a predetermined agenda. Such generalisation, error and supposition contrast sharply with The One Show's genuine engagement with and unparalleled access to the professional preparation and care that a racehorse receives.

McKelvey's legacy may prove a greater understanding of the realities of racing. It would be a substantial epitaph.