Modern life: what’s it done?

“We are essentially confining our horses to small, boring spaces, with little opportunity for adventure and throwing them a bag of sweets twice a day”

Modern life has unintentionally imposed lifestyles on horses that they aren’t well equipped to deal with. When you consider they are designed for continuous movement, a varied environment, an active social life, and relish the challenge of finding food, it is not difficult to see how we can get it wrong.

Modern methods of keeping horses invariably involve stabling, relatively small turnout areas, lack of social interaction, short, infrequent exercise, little foraging for food and the feeding of high-intensity concentrates. We are essentially confining them to small, boring spaces, with little opportunity for adventure and throwing them a bag of sweets twice a day.

Of course, many of us try to mimic what nature intended as best we can with the facilities we have, but there’s always more we can do, and it is surprising how much room for improvement there is if we get our critical heads on.

Mind and body

It’s wonderful to see professionals speaking out about the benefits of hacking and jumping dressage horses, or turning out and swimming racehorses. To be a top athlete you need to be healthy both mentally and physically, so the importance of lifestyle as a whole is starting to be recognised and appreciated by all.

It would be easy to assume most leisure horses have it the best, as they are frequently turned out for long periods and undergo more varied forms of exercise, but is this assumption correct?

Our busy lifestyles mean that many leisure horses are only exercised a few times a week, if that, and sometimes at very low intensity and for short periods. Couple this with uninspiring turnout and lack of companionship and some leisure horses can easily lead a very sedentary life. Inadequate exercise and lack of mental stimulation may be having more of a detrimental effect than we realise.