THE RDS Coaching for the Future Symposium welcomed a raft of excellent speakers to last week’s conference in St Mary’s Church in Ballsbridge where a wide range of issues facing the sport horse sector in Ireland and worldwide were discussed.

One impressive speaker was Dr Camie Heleski who is the senior lecturer in the Agriculture Equine Programme at the University of Kentucky and specialist in equine behaviour and welfare. Her presentation to the attendees centred on the topics of positive welfare – helping the horse live a happy life, the ‘buzz word’ of social license and public perception of equine sport.

Dr Heleski said: “We need to start thinking about how we emphasise positive welfare; not just avoiding a negative life, but creating a good life. For the longest time, we tried not to have horses that were thirsty or hungry or hurt - now, we have to ask, are they happy?

“People would love it to be something that we could just take a blood sample and do a litmus test and automatically we know if that horse has 90% welfare or that a horse has only 20% good welfare. We don’t have that kind of tool and I don’t know that we ever will.”

Dr Heleski added that she enjoys riding her Arabian gelding in dressage and is in favour of horse sport. “We are not trying to diminish horse sport. Sometimes you get painted with a broad brush because you’re talking so much about horse welfare… people want to put you in the same bracket as some of the more radical people that maybe protest at different events.

“There is a place for us to love a horse, to work with the horse every day and to be advocating for the horses without going so far as to say we can’t do horse sport. I totally believe we can give horses that are involved in sport a good life.”

Freedom

Dr Heleski is an advocate for the three f’s for horses. “Friends, forage, freedom. If we get those three right, we’re already doing a great job for horse welfare,” she explained.

“The horse was evolved to go miles and miles every single day — we can’t expect a creature like that to be happy standing still in a box. It’s not always going to be perfect, but the goal is to do better — more turnout, more contact, more choice.”

Just a few irresponsible horse owners can do huge damage to an industry, according to the lecturer. “When you know better, you do better and that is what we need to be thinking about all the time. It is not just okay that when I was in my 20s and I saw some really horrific training methods. We need to be better than that and hopefully we are moving in that direction.

“The public isn’t only watching how we treat the live horse. They want to know what happens after too. In racing, for example, even one catastrophic failure that leads to a horse’s death is, for some people, one too many.”