Hillydale Horse Welfare and Research

13/06/2026

Every year since 2022, British charity, World Horse Welfare have surveyed around 4,000 people in the United Kingdom on their views about the uses of horses in sport, the welfare of sport horses and the use of equipment that causes pain and shared the findings at a public forum.

Over the five years around 60% of respondents say they're not content with the status quo and in 2026, nearly 40% of respondents said they were not comfortable with the use of horses for sport at all and nearly 80% of people said it was not acceptable to use even short term pain to to achieve a performance goal.

World Horse Welfare are to be commended for running these surveys and sharing the results but what interests me is how those results are then presented.

The pattern over the past five years has been to assemble a group of experts from racing, equestrian, a vet and in some years an animal welfare scientists and veterinary ethicist who discuss the findings, what they mean for the future of horse sport and what needs to be done to maintain the social licence, or more recently, public acceptance of the use of horses in sport.

The consistent response to the findings has been that the problem is one of communication: more openness, better social media, more behind-the-scenes content. Show people how much we love our horses to improve trust and confidence that sport horses are well cared for. A kind of bait and switch. Communication, not welfare.

And when welfare is discussed there's a pattern about how it is discussed and framed. When the panellists argue for better welfare - more turnout, less whip use, more humane training, the justification that is used is "performance".

Happier horse, better horse. As one prominent rider put it: "if you've got a happier, more content horse, you're gonna have a better horse."

On the surface it sounds and feels right. But it's not.

To begin with, current science doesn't support it beyond the obvious- sick or lame horses don't perform well.

The data on whether horses who experience better or even good welfare outside of competition, (regular social contact, freedom of movement, behavioural choice)or during training are more competitive hasn't been demonstrated.

In some disciplines the evidence points the other way. In dressage, conflict behaviours, open mouths, tail swishing, pinned ears are not penalised and horses showing those signs win gold medals.

So why ask the general public what they think about welfare and then pivot to welfare as a performance metric or communication as the solution to the welfare issue identified by the public?

The performance framing makes the welfare argument palatable to an industry that finds the alternative unpalatable: that horses have interests that matter independently of what they do for us.

That welfare isn't a tool for better results or better public relations. That it defines how horses experience their lives and that experience should be a constraint on how horses are used for sport and performance purposes.

Five consecutive years of survey data say clearly that people want welfare prioritised, not packaged as a slick video. And yet the organisations positioned as guardians of horse welfare keep bringing the conversation back to messaging. What to say. How to say it. Who to say it to.

Not what to change. Not what horses actually need beyond vague ideas about turnout and ad-lib hay in stables. Not what the evidence says causes them harm.

Welfare as its own justification- that horses deserve good lives because they are the kinds of beings who can have good or bad lives shouldn't need a performance metric as a justification to care about or do something about it.

The public already knows this. It would be good if the people who speak for horses advanced this too.

13/06/2026

Here's something most horse people feel but don't often say out loud: we really need our horses to love what we do with them.

Not just tolerate it. Not just comply. Love it.

Ears forward over the fence. The horse who self-loads onto the float. The nickers at dinner time.

That need is understandable. Most of us got into horses out of genuine love for them.

The idea that our horse might find competition stressful, or find jumping aversive, or find the whole enterprise something to be endured -that's not something to make us feel comfortable, especially when our horsey lives are central to our identity, our community, weekends, sense of who we are.

So we look for the signs that confirm what we hope. And horses, being the socially sensitive, human-attuned animals they are, give us plenty to work with. Enthusiasm at feed time means enthusiasm for riding. Compliance with our cues as enjoyment of the activity. The impatience in the collecting ring is a desire to get out and show off in front of the crowd.

A lack of overt distress, calmness and responsiveness- a horse that is coping well and maybe even having fun.

Nearly three decades of equitation and equine behaviour science asks us to be a little more careful here.

What we know that horses are strongly motivated by predictability, social connection with each other and us if there's no equine friends around, food, and the relief from fear and pain.

They form habits quickly and repeat those habits without necessarily considering if it is what they want to be doing.

They learn quickly what precedes what. A horse who loads calmly may simply be doing what he has always done, not because he loves competition. A horse who moves forward from light cues in an arena may be responding to learned cues in a familiar environment. These are not small things. They tell us the horse is probably in an OK place. But they don't tell us the horse is having a good time, especially in the way we imagine.

The harder question:whether horses, given genuine choice, would select the activities we value is almost never asked. Partly because it's methodologically difficult do research and partly because we're not sure we want the answer.

What we do know is that horses show us stress, conflict, and discomfort in ways that are easy to spot if we're looking for them: tense and busy mouths, foamy saliva, wrinkled eyes, swishing tails, sweating up, ear posture changes in breathing.

We also know that in competitive environments, those signals are routinely interpreted as excitement, or keenness, or just "how this horse goes," because the alternative interpretation is too uncomfortable to sustain.

So calm, well trained horses, ridden by sensitive riders who release at the right time and use the least amount of pain from bits and spurs as cues are probably not miserable. They are probably fine. But "probably fine" and "loves it" are different claims.

The belief that our horses love what we do with them is, at its heart, a desire that our relationship with them costs them nothing.

But to sustain that we have to look away or not see the many different ways that horses tell us they don't enjoy what we do to and with them. That doesn't mean that using them to fulfil our goals and dreams is inherently a bad or immoral thing to do.

But genuinely caring for them means seeing things from their perspective and not allowing our hopes to blind us to their reality.

06/06/2026

World Horse Welfare has just released the results of its fifth annual survey of the UK public's views on the use of horses for sport and recreation. They are to be commended for undertaking this research and sharing the findings. Because they are not good for the sport.

The survey shows declining support for the use of horses in sport.

The majority of people want welfare put ahead of performance, most reject training that causes pain for a result, and a growing number no longer think the use of horses for sport is acceptable in any form.

Equitation science keeps showing those instincts are sound.

Whipping tired horses in races.
Tight nosebands
Hyperflexion
Blue tongues
Oral lesions
Gastric ulcers
Stereotypies
The conflict behaviours that don't get in the way of gold medals or that are the just normal business of riding.

So what did World Horse Welfare's own forum largely conclude?

That the problem is communication.

That the public is urban, uninformed. So dismissible. Nothing to learn here.

People are worried about what happens to horses.

The evidence says they are right to be.

And the industry keeps answering a welfare question with a PR strategy.

You cannot communicate your way out of a problem the science, and the evidence of your own eyes says is real.

Our charity will reveal results of annual YouGov opinion poll at a briefing for horse sport leaders and the media on 3rd June.

13/05/2026

We use hardness to make horses soft.
The standard route to a "soft" horse, one that yields to the rein, flexes at the poll, accepts a "contact" is through the application of pressure to the mouth.

Sometimes steady pressure. Sometimes pressure that comes on and off. Sometimes escalating pressure. Sometimes pressure the horse cannot escape, because the rider's hands, the side reins, the bit crushing the tongue or stretching the lips make sure of it.

The horse eventually flexes, yields or gives, depending on the terminology. The tension in the rein drops. We call this softening.

Many training methods claim it is essential- give to the bit, give the face, lateral flexion at the halt and more besides.

But softening is our word for what happens to the tension we feel in the rein, not what the horse experiences.

What the horse did when it felt the bit, was learn the response that turned off the pressure and the pain it caused.

This is negative reinforcement which we know works. It is also, depending on the pressure used and the horse's capacity to escape it, a route through pain, confusion, stress to a head and neck position that we have decided looks correct.

Softness in the rein is not the same as softness in the horse. It is just a horse learning to escape and avoid the pain and pressure we deliberately cause in service of our riding or training goals.

There's zero about it that is "correct" for the horse.

27/04/2026

This writer gets it about not seeing what we actually see when we observe horses in competition. This piece is focused on dressage but it is equally applicable to most equestrian sport.

https://dressageforthefuture.substack.com/p/gaslighting-in-dressage?

Don’t Believe Your Eyes

24/03/2026

Can we ever be trusted to genuinely safeguard our horses' welfare when every time we get on one, our ego, our dreams, our goals and what the horse wants and needs conflict.

Enjoy the videos and music you love, upload original content, and share it all with friends, family, and the world on YouTube.

01/03/2026

Something so very ordinary about the post shown below, and so very ordinary about one of the reactions.

So much that's available to see, but isn't. So much evidence we've trained our eyes not to see, our brains not to process.

That allows us to create these narratives, these well meaning and genuine explanations desiring to inform, educate, inspire.

All the while blinding us to what is there in front of our eyes. The seen and yet unseen horse, missing in plain sight.

If we consider things from the horse's perspective, what choice does it really have here?

Spurs digging into its side with such force the skin and fascia underneath are being visibly displaced.

Such force applied to the reins that the lips are stretched and distorted. Excess saliva foaming and dripping because the horse is unable to swallow due to the disabling of the function of its tongue, crushed under the pressure of the bit.

There is no escaping the pain for this horse, only a choice between which pain is greatest- pain in its mouth or pain in its sides. Seems pain in the sides is the winner, because despite all the pain in its mouth, it is continuing to move forward.

Or perhaps it has learnt that the pain in its mouth is inescapable and reacting to that pain will only deliver more pain, such as even more pain from the spurs?

I am not posting this to shame any one rider, any one equestrian facility offering advice, or the person who comments that they love the harmony they are seeing. This is simply the latest of this genre of post that fills my feed. I have no doubt the rider, the poster, the commenter all want what's they believe is best for their horses.

It is to highlight how much we lose sight of the horse when we use it. How we compartmentalise it into its various body parts and functions- its head and neck position, the height of its forelegs, the duration of the suspension phase, the extension or flexion of joints.

How in doing so we lose sight of the whole horse. The horse that feels, has preferences, experiences joy and fear and pain.

The horse we turn into a symbol, a vessel to fill with our hopes, our dreams our identity. The horse that we experience through those perspectives.

The horse whose obvious pain we can't see. Whose pain is the predictable, inevitable consequence of using bits and spurs to make compliance with our demands the horse's only choice.

A "choice" we explain in terms of biomechanics, training, "accepting" the contact and all the other comforting fictions we use to hide the reality of what our dreams authorise us to do to horses we say we love.

If we are genuine in about being the guardians of our horses' welfare then we need to actually see the horse. Not the dreams, not the training goals, not the medals, the prizes, the status, the kudos, the expert knowledge.

See the horse, as a horse, experiencing what we do to it and demand of it, from the horse's perspective.

25/02/2026

Major new paper about how to think about animals and their welfare.

Extends the five domains and provides all who care for, use or are concerned about animals a coherent and structured way to understand animals and their welfare.

Provides the theorectical basis for how to understand and over time, implement "equi-centric" welfare pratcices

Very proud to be a co-author on this paper but all credit to Cristina Wilkins for her groundbreaking insights that have led to this groundbreaking contribution to animal welfare science.

Free to read.

This paper introduces the teleonome as a unifying biological construct that clarifies the goal-directed organised system by which organisms engage in adaptiv...

20/02/2026

Could a lack of sleep quality impact your horse's ability to learn? In this study, horses with more REM sleep persisted longer with a reversal learning task. This is a task the requires horses to be flexible and adapt their behaviour as the rules of the task change-something we rely on a lot when we retrain our horses.

The study used a food rewarded task (positive reinforcement) so it remains to be seen if the same is true of aversive learning tasks (that use equipment that applies aversive pressures- bits, leg cues, whips, spurs, halters etc).

Just as for humans, sufficient sleep supports learning and coping for horses. A recent study at the University of Helsinki indicates that short periods of REM sleep impair horses' perseverance and performance in demanding learning tasks. In a study published in the journal Scientific Reports, an ent...

11/02/2026

Little teaser: impending publication about how to understand animals and animal welfare that will revolutionise how we do things with animals, including research, training, competition, production, conservation.

Proud to play a tiny part but all credit to Cristina Wilkins for her vision and outstanding scholarship conceiving and developing this exciting new concept which will make a positive difference to the welfare of the animals in our lives.

The full paper will be available very soon.

This paper introduces the teleonome as a unifying biological construct that clarifies the goal-directed organised system by which organisms engage in adaptiv...