How Culture Keeps Horses in Chains
To the casual observer, equestrian culture looks like devotion. Horses gleam under careful grooming, their diets are measured out with scientific precision, and stables boast meticulous management. From the outside, it seems as though no animal could be more pampered.
But peel back the polished veneer and the story changes. Behind the gloss of competition lies a regime of confinement, coercion, and commodification. Horses are spoken of with love while being stripped of freedom. Their bodies are maintained like luxury vehicles, while their minds are ignored. What appears as “care” is in fact control.
A recent qualitative study of 22 equestrians in North America and the UK provides an unfiltered glimpse into this contradiction. Riders, trainers, and coaches described their attitudes toward horse welfare, and revealed just how deeply culture, identity, and industry interests sustain practices that compromise horses’ lives.
This research exposes not simply individual failings, but a system. It is a system that trains humans from childhood to accept exploitation as tradition, teaches them to rationalise cruelty as care, and dismisses the public as ignorant when they protest.
For abolitionists, it confirms what we already know: welfare reforms cannot fix industries built on domination. The equestrian world is no exception.
“But My Horse is Well Cared For”
The study opens with a refrain familiar across all forms of animal use: but my horse is well cared for. Participants readily admitted that practices like long hours in stalls, social isolation, harsh bits, or even bloodied mouths were harmful. Yet they instantly reframed or trivialised these realities. A horse locked indoors 22 hours a day was described as “content.” Whip use and bloody spur marks were waved away as “not particularly concerning.” One rider even explained away withholding turnout because the horses were “naughty” and had “lost their privileges.”
This is not ignorance. Equestrians know what horses need, freedom, movement, companionship, grazing. They even say it themselves. The contradiction lies in holding that knowledge while continuing to participate in a culture that denies it.
Psychologists call this cognitive dissonance: the discomfort of knowing your actions clash with your beliefs. But instead of changing the behaviour, people change the narrative. Horses are recast as “happy” in confinement, or their distress reframed as evidence of resilience. In this way, exploitation is made to look like devotion.
The “Good Life” Myth
One of the most entrenched beliefs uncovered in the study is that horses “need a job” to thrive.
Participants repeated the idea that without work, horses would not survive or would become depressed. A horse’s happiness, they claimed, could be measured in performance. Retirement was even described as fatal, horses supposedly “dropped dead” once removed from competition.
This myth is convenient. It transforms exploitation into benevolence. A horse forced into relentless training is no longer enslaved; he is “fulfilled.” A mare confined to a stall is not imprisoned; she is “protected” so she can keep competing. The job itself, jumping, dressage, eventing, becomes proof of wellbeing, even when it directly undermines the horse’s freedom and safety.
Yet some equestrians contradicted this narrative in the very same breath. They spoke longingly of a “good life” as one where horses could “just be horses”, free to graze, socialise, and live outdoors. But such visions were immediately dismissed as “not how the industry works.”
Here lies the dissonance: equestrians know what a horse needs, but admit the sport will not allow it. And rather than rejecting the system, they compromise the horse.
Turning Horses Into Tools
The study highlights a disturbing but predictable reality: horses are objectified.
A “good horse” was defined as one that is “willing to work” and “does as they’re asked.” Compliance was prized above all. Resistance was met with punishment or harsher tack. Horses unable to perform were deemed “not worth keeping” and sold. One participant noted bluntly: “If they haven’t got a job and they haven’t got a purpose, they’re sent somewhere else… mares go as broodmares, geldings just go for sale.”
This is the logic of property, not partnership. Horses are fungible, replaceable parts in a machine. Their value lies not in their being but in their use.
Some riders even suggested horses “consent” to their use, framing compliance as choice. But consent under coercion is not consent at all. A horse trained with whips, bits, and isolation cannot meaningfully “choose” to perform. What looks like willingness is often resignation, a survival strategy under domination.
Welfare as Investment
Equestrians often boast that their animals are treated better than humans. Horses receive physio, dental care, and specialist diets that many humans cannot afford. But as the study makes clear, this is not recognition of horses as subjects, it is investment in an asset.
One rider summed it up: “A happy athlete is going to produce results.”
Care is instrumentalised. Horses are maintained not for their own sake, but because performance depends on it. Welfare becomes a means to an end: success in competition, profit, or protecting the industry’s “social licence.”
As one participant put it, caring for horses was also about silencing critics: “Tell those PETA motherf***ers that we’re taking care of business.”
Here, care is stripped of empathy. It is no longer about respecting another’s life. It is about keeping the machine running and the public quiet.
How Exploitation is Normalised
Perhaps the most revealing finding is the role of enculturation, the process by which harmful practices are normalised and passed down through generations.
Nearly all participants entered equestrian culture as children, often as young as four. They described themselves as “horse crazy” or “addicted.” From their first lessons, they were taught that confinement, control, and punishment were just how things are done. Trainers reinforced these norms, and to question them meant exclusion or ridicule.
Enculturation is powerful because it feels natural. By the time riders are adults, the idea of horses as property, performers, or athletes is ingrained. Outsider voices, the public, activists, even scientists, are dismissed as ignorant. As one rider put it: “You don’t let everybody have a vote.”
This cultural bubble protects exploitation from scrutiny. It ensures that welfare reforms move at a snail’s pace. And it makes emancipation almost unthinkable from within.
Voices of Resistance
Despite the weight of tradition, a few participants described breaking away. Some could no longer stomach the sight of horses beaten into submission. Others realised their empathy clashed irreconcilably with the norms of competition.
One participant, told to punch her horse in the face, finally drew the line: “This horse has been nothing but kind to me. She’s been so sweet. I don’t want to keep hitting her.” Another, reflecting on isolation and constant work, confessed: “In retrospect, it really bothers me to think about how they were treated.”
These moments matter. They show that empathy can pierce through conditioning. They prove that not all equestrians are blind to the injustice. Some choose to walk away. And in doing so, they expose the lie that horses “need” the life humans impose on them.
Why Welfare Reform Fails
Animal welfare frameworks like the “Five Domains” emphasise nutrition, environment, health, behaviour, and mental state. Applied honestly, they show that most performance horses live impoverished lives. But equestrian culture is adept at twisting science into justification, or ignoring it altogether.
Reforms stall because the root problem is not ignorance but objectification. As long as horses are property, their “welfare” will always be weighed against human profit, tradition, and ego. So long as they are defined by their usefulness, their needs will be secondary.
This is why campaigns urging “better welfare” fail to transform the industry. You cannot reform slavery into kindness. You cannot domesticate exploitation into justice.
An Abolitionist Vision
What this study makes clear is that equestrian culture is not about horses, it is about humans. It is about identity, tradition, and profit. Horses are the raw material.
The solution is not larger stalls, kinder bits, or more turnout. The solution is emancipation. To reject the very premise that horses exist to be ridden, jumped, or displayed. To see them not as athletes or partners, but as individuals with their own lives to live.
Abolition means ending their use altogether, not tinkering with how it’s done. It means breaking the cultural cycle of enculturation and teaching children that horses are not ours to own. It means standing outside the bubble and refusing to be silenced by accusations of ignorance.
The equestrian mask of “care” must be stripped away. Behind it lies slavery, dressed up as sport. The task before us is not to make that slavery gentler, but to end it.
The Horse as Someone, Not Something
Equestrian culture tells itself a comforting story: that love and domination can coexist, that care and confinement are compatible, that slavery can be noble if the stable is polished enough.
But this study cuts through the illusion. It reveals the dissonance, the justifications, the conditioning that allows exploitation to persist. And it shows the few who break free, proof that another path is possible.
The truth is simple: a horse’s good life is not defined by human goals. It is defined by the horse, grazing, moving, playing, choosing. Until that is recognised, welfare will always be rhetoric, not reality.