‘Ask the question every day’: why welfare is what horses need – not what we think they need

We should not assume we know what is best for our horses – but use the evidence they give us to ask them and take all the positives from what we do.

These were key messages from a World Horse Welfare webinar on assessing horses’ welfare, presented by Jill Fernandes on 18 March.

Dr Fernandes, founder of welfare and sustainability consultancy Animal Centric, had worked with organisations from aquariums to zoos before she collaborated with World Horse Welfare to create a programme for assessment and assurance of equine wellbeing. The aim of the presentation was to explain how the Horses’ Experiences of Yards (HEY) tool was created and how it can be used by all to assess their horses’ welfare.

Access the tool

“I’ve learned way more from animals than I’ve ever taught anyone,” she said. “I’m very grateful for all they continue to teach me.

“Before we go any further, animal welfare is not how we feel the animal is doing, it’s how the animal feels the animal is doing. It really is defined by the animal, and it’s from the animal’s perspective and it’s the animal’s emotional experience.

“It’s the positive and negative emotions the animal is experiencing inside their nervous system and body. Unlike animal ethics, which is human-centric and defined by human opinions and values, animal welfare is 100% animal-centric because it’s actually happening inside the animal.”

Dr Fernandes equated welfare to the weather; as people use multiple factors such as temperature, wind speed and pressure to define overall weather, we take in a huge range of evidence, including behaviour, appearance and actions, to understand what an animal is feeling.

She added that the overall aim for good welfare is to maximise positive experiences and minimise the negative, and that she prefers the five domains model to assess it. The domains are nutrition, environment, health, and behavioural interactions and their impact on the fifth, mental state.

“We can’t know exactly what the animal’s mental state is or what they may be experiencing, but if we have enough evidence about whether their needs are being met in the four functional domains, we can make a cautious interpretation about their mental state,” she said. “The more measures we have, the more complete that interpretation will be.

“The gold standard for assessing animal welfare is animal-based evidence, which includes behavioral measures and physiological measures.”

Assessing horses’ welfare

Dr Fernandes worked with the World Horse Welfare teams at each of the charity’s farms, developing key welfare criteria and then scoring each horse in each area, and discussing how the scores could be improved. Once changes were made, the team observed the horses in the long term, to check that their experiences had improved as a result. They used this to develop the HEY tool, which is free for all owners to use.

“It has the same essence of that structured assessment we did, with 40 criteria,” she said. “You can identify positive and negative indicators for each need, then spot where changes might be needed and where you can take action.

“If I could ask you to do one action out of this, I would say ask the animal every day, if you can, what are you feeling? What do you want? Is this better for you? You can use the animal’s behaviour to answer those questions, but it’s important to actually ask the question in the beginning.”

World Horse Welfare education officer Rebecca Boulert said creating a shorter HEY tool for yards was an aim from the start, so all the criteria were decided on with other yards, to “get as many positive experiences out there for horses as possible, based on Jill’s excellent framework”.

Ideas in practice

Ms Boulert added that the charity has put the ideas into practice by, for example, removing some barriers between stables so horses can touch each other, and providing areas of woodchip or hardstanding, to see whether the horses take advantage.

“It’s still early days; changes are being made and we’ll talk about them more as we get more feedback from the horses,” she said.

Asked for a closing message, Dr Fernandes reiterated her key point, that welfare has to be from the horse’s perspective rather than ours.

Ms Boulert added: “I think it’s quite easy when we’re doing welfare assessment tools to spiral in on what might not be working so well. But when we were going through the process, it actually gave us a really good opportunity to reflect on all the positives we were providing for the horses in our care.

“So yes, we want to make sure we’re providing as many positive experiences as possible, but don’t go down a negative spiral. There are always positives to take away.”

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