When commercial success drives equestrian sport, welfare science reveals how breeding decisions, training systems, and competition incentives shape the horse’s lived experience across nutrition, environment, health, behaviour, and mental state.
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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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Wild and free-living horses offer vital reference points for hoof health, showing how terrain, movement, and social life shape both the foot and the horse’s welfare.
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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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Why do welfare problems persist in horse sport despite growing knowledge and regulation? Drawing on a webinar by Lisa Ashton, this article argues that welfare fails when culture fails — and explores how mental security, reciprocity, and whole-systems thinking can help patch the leaky bucket.
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Across the UK, riding schools are rethinking welfare from the horse’s perspective. The Riding School Futures Project shows how integrating the Five Domains Model, equitation science, and staff education is reshaping everyday practice — not through rules, but through cultural change.
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Next month, the FEI is expected to approve a rule change allowing horses to continue competing after visible bleeding — reversing a welfare safeguard into an administrative warning. The proposal places the sport’s “welfare is paramount” rhetoric at odds with its fragile social licence.
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This letter, declined by the Equine Veterinary Journal, responds to MacKechnie-Guire et al.’s defence of their noseband pressure study. It clarifies key methodological and interpretive issues that remain unresolved and highlights why transparent discussion is vital to the integrity of equine welfare science.
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In academic publishing, critique and reply are essential to scientific progress. This letter—declined by the Equine Veterinary Journal—is published here to complete the public record. It clarifies key methodological issues in a study of noseband pressures and highlights the importance of open discourse for equine welfare policy.
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Emeritus Professor David Mellor—architect of the Five Domains Model—explores the biological and behavioural evidence showing that all bits, regardless of design, cause mouth pain. Drawing on decades of welfare science, he argues that the perfect bit is the one never placed in a horse’s mouth.
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