Your horse's personal life

So much of the horse industry is human-centred. Livery yards advertise how many arenas they have, their gallops, their hacking, their XC course, their solariums and their beautiful, immaculate stable yard. While all of these are nice things to have, their value is to us not the horse.

Realistically most of us are perhaps spending a few hours a day with our horses at the most, and while its lovely to do enriching things together, what is your horse doing the rest of the time when you aren’t there? I like to call this the horse’s personal life.

Making sure your horse’s needs are fulfilled is not just a good thing to do for them, it is vital to their overall wellbeing. A horse who’s emotional needs are not being met is never going to thrive. Stress behaviours have been so normalised that we are mistaking horses that are struggling for horses with “quirky” or “sharp” personalities, often explained away by their breeding or type so we don’t have to look any deeper.

🐴 Horses need social interaction with other horses. Given the opportunity horses will develop complex and meaningful relationships with each other. A horse that isn’t allowed to socialise properly will be an anxious horse and will not be able to thrive emotionally or physically.

The absolute ideal for me are small, stable herds. It can be extremely stressful for horses to leave and new horses to be introduced frequently. It is worth keeping this in mind when you’re on a livery yard where this is happening to your horse, lots of change in their personal life will leave them feeling anxious and may show up in their behaviour with you.

🐴 Horses need to have the freedom to express natural behaviours. This goes beyond just providing a turnout area, although I appreciate even this is a struggle for some. We need to be providing enrichment opportunities for horses to socialise, roll, graze, forage, play etc. An individual square of flat ground with electric fence on all sides is not very enriching. There are lots of things we can do to to improve the areas we have to work with and make them more horse-friendly.

🐴 Horses need appropriate forage. Leaving horses for long periods without forage is going to cause stress and eventually health issues like stomach ulcers, their guts are designed to trickle feed. If we can source appropriate forage that is diverse and low in digestible energy, we can safely feed all types of horses an appropriate amount of forage, keeping their gut healthy and mimicking how they would eat naturally.

🐴 Horses need to feel safe and comfortable in their environment. Horses will not lie down and get their REM sleep if they don’t feel safe or have somewhere comfortable to do so, this very quickly becomes a welfare issue. If you have a horse who is jumping out of their field or fence walking to come in all the time, consider that they don’t feel safe out there and think about how we can change that. Its not fulfilling a need if your horse finds the area you have provided stressful.

Also give a thought to the surfaces your horse has to use. It is no fun slopping around in hock deep mud with nowhere to get out of it, and it is also no fun to be on a rough hardstanding if you have sore hooves. We need to make sure our horses always have the option to have somewhere comfortable to be.

I appreciate this can be really difficult to achieve on livery yards and I am absolutely not saying everyone needs to have the perfect setup, I certainly don’t. But if we don’t demand change it won’t come. Even if we start by convincing more yards to create all-weather turnout/loafing areas instead of shutting horses in stables for days on end during bad weather. I often think of how outraged we would be if a zoo wasn’t keeping their animals in species-specific enriched enclosures, and yet it is completely acceptable to do this to horses.

How rich is your horse’s personal life? 🐴