Young Sport Horse Attrition in the U.K; is it truly ALARP?

Spooky?

Nearly two weeks ago I wrote to the British Horse Society (BHS) asking for their opinion on the rate of attrition amongst young sport horses in the UK. My interest in the topic had come about as a result of questions asked on my YouTube channel. Some young horses seemed to have been progressing well and then simply disappeared. My questions to the BHS were around their management of this situation from a horse welfare point of view, were they aware of it as an issue and were they keeping the rate of attrition "as low as reasonably practicable" (ALARP).  

One thing I noticed was that, two hours after sending the email, I spookily received an email from British Dressage inviting me to the Young Horse Forum 2022. The email claimed to come from a “mailing list” but as others have told me that they didn’t receive it I suspect this has more to do with tracking cookies than an innocent coincidence.

Unfortunately I won’t be attending the Young Horse Forum 2022 but with topics such as: 

• Working with the FEI directives for five to seven year olds
• Well-being of the equine athlete

this will give people the chance to ask the same questions that I asked of the BHS.

While I was waiting for a response..........

What I’ve found from my own initial research, based on looking at horses entered into Young Horse Classes in 2015 - 2019 and then looking when their British Dressage record appears to stop, suggests that the rate of attrition could be as high as 25 per cent after five years. This analysis isn't entirely fool proof and is only based on 7 to 9 year olds but I see it as a starting point for the discussion.

My wider research has indicated that anecdotally, elite riders are credited with being better able to bring on young horses faster than their less elite counterparts. This is all based on their ability to balance the horse and ride in harmony with them thereby reducing the strains on young bones and joints. Once again my research suggests that this belief is a fallacy, or at best not proven, certainly when elite are compared with not quite elite riders. It could be argued that riders with fewer horses to ride have to be more careful with their mounts because they presumably appreciate they have to make the horse "last". 

A few days after my email to the BHS I received my copy of the Spring 2022 edition of British Horse, the official magazine of The British Horse Society, featuring Carl Hester and the young horse Jaguar I on the front cover. As the article promised to "explore the core values and beliefs underpinning Carl Hester's success" I thought it would be interesting to read on and see what it said about the young horse phase of development. It is worth noting that when I videoed Jaguar I in Spring 2021 I was asked to remove the video from YouTube as "he [Jaguar I] was very overwhelmed and [the video] doesn't look good on the horse". I was also told that, as owner, "Carl would not be happy with the video being made public". This is the opposite side of "the good things about social media" coin talked about in the article which involves ensuring you only publish the good and suppress the not quite so good.

As I suspected the article does not talk about the management of young horse attrition but instead paints a rosy picture of young horses running free in their paddocks, a "happy retirement" for Uthopia and Valegro, repurposing for some horses but without telling us what has become of those horses that didn't make the grade (or the financial necessity that drove the sales of both Hawtins Delicato and Gio).

I’m sure you didn't come here to bash your hero but, as you will see discussed below, a failure by governing bodies to appropriately challenge or make judgements, plus a general desire to believe in fairy stories can be a key part of the problem. It is the same as seeing glossy images on Instagram and thinking we can all be like that. Life isn't like that; we cannot progress if we constantly fear “rocking the boat".

One thing I took from the recent incident with Mark Todd is the concept of social licence for our sport through public tolerance as explained by one of the eventing websites. The public didn't tolerate a pony being hit with a branch and they are unlikely to tolerate horses being knowingly bred for a limited life expectancy either.

My Analysis

In the absence of any feedback from the British Horse Society I decided to undertake my own research  based on examining the British Dressage competition record for those horses that took part in the annual Young Horse PSG Championship, during the Hartpury Gala Evening, between 2015 and 2019, to see if they are still competing today. I accept that this is a small subset of young dressage horses but as these are the top horses in the class and also at the top end of the young horse age range (being 7 to 9 years old) I hoped it would paint the most optimistic picture. 

My anonymised results are shown below, in tabular form and demonstrate that amongst this group of forty horses we lost three a year so that after an aggregated 5 year period only 75% remained. Of course I always expected that there would inevitably be some attrition, accidents will happen, hence my question to the BHS was were they sighted on it, were they monitoring it and do they believe the rate is as low as reasonably practicable.

The ALARP triangle

Feedback from Social Media

To gain a sense of perspective I posted the graph for 2015 on my Facebook Page and asked the question "do you think we have a problem, or do you think this rate of attrition is to be expected and tolerable?" The post gained an excellent response from people across all walks of equestrian life. There were riders who preferred to keep their horses away from young horse competition, breeders who felt riders had unrealistic expectations when buying young horses, vets who spoke of the adverse impact on longevity and development of young horse classes and useful links to previous research on the topic together with case studies. There was a suggestion that young horse competition had grown bigger than it needed to be but it was also suggested that young horse competitions were  no longer show cases for future stars but were now and end unto themselves with horses being bred specifically to excel in them.

The picture I took away from the replies to the post was of a vicious circle where judges now rewarded horses with extravagant, big moving gaits, such that riders believe that is the type of spectacular horse they need to succeed, so breeders breed foals to meet this demand with breed societies not helping by licensing hypermobile stallions in the quest for more and more spectacular progeny. Elite riders, with adequate backing, can afford to take the risk that one out of five such horses might just succeed and get to the top thereby reinforcing the judges prejudice that this is how a horse should move. You add into this a toxic mix of big money, sponsorship and owner and rider reputation and you can see why we have a problem.

The BHS response

While I was preparing this blog I received my response from the BHS. I would like to think the social media activity in response to the Facebook post spurred them into action although the response is basically "not our problem gov". They explained that they represent the leisure and recreational side of the business and that my questions needed to be directed towards British Equestrian as the National Governing Body for horse sports in the UK, who include World Horse Welfare amongst their Member Bodies. Don't get me started on "why do we need all these different organisations?" but I will now pose the same questions to British Equestrian. 

  

The Way Forward      

What does this mean in practice, what response do I expect from the BEF? Clearly a simple answer might be to leave the animals longer to develop before competing them; but obviously this would come at a cost as animals have to be kept and presumably increase in value as their competition record matures. An ALARP study would seek to justify the additional cost involved in not competing them against the improvement in animal welfare (reduction in risk of injury and therefore risk to life) and demonstrate that the equestrian world is doing all it can to move the risk from being tolerable and into a region where is is broadly acceptable. And of course that has to be acceptable to the public in general in order to square the social licence/public tolerance circle.

The study would also seek to identify how some horses manage to survive this phase of development/competition and why some do not; is it down to conformation, training techniques, over training or over competing? As there is guidance available from the FEI then there hopefully is a degree of science behind their guidelines so it might be time to look at it again and decide if it is still appropriate.

I will post again when I hear back from the BEF.

Every horse deserves to be 24 with attitude!
©Harveywetdog

Anonymised Results of Analysis in Graphical Form 

Note: some horses have not competed yet in 2022 so I had to make a judgement as to whether they would compete this year or not hence the prediction in grey.