Ask a farrier what’s wrong with your horse and the answer starts in the feet. Ask a nutritionist and it starts in the feed bucket. It’s funny because it’s true — and it’s true because it’s biology. This article explores how your experience and expertise shape what you detect in your horse, what you miss, and why a whole-horse welfare assessment process changes everything.
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We assess animal welfare by measuring stress hormones, counting behaviours, and checking for disease. But what’s missing is a way to evaluate these data from the animals’ lived experience. A new framework — the teleonome — offers a biological north star for welfare science, grounded in each species’ own evolutionary logic.
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You’ve seen it. The horse pacing the fence line, wearing a track in the ground. The one who calls out, again and again, when stabled alone. We call these problems. But most of us have a quieter sense that something else is going on. That quieter sense is correct — and now there’s a word for what it’s pointing at.
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Horse people are often told a practice is “evidence-based” — but how can you tell whether research truly puts horses’ welfare first? This article explains why behaviour and equipment studies carry hidden risks, introduces the COMPASS Guidelines, and shows how non-researchers can ask better, welfare-focused questions before trusting claims or volunteering their horses.
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When uncomfortable images of horses are dismissed as “just moments in time,” photographer Crispin Parelius Johannessen asks what happens when every moment is documented—and why selective trophy shots may be the real illusion
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