GREEN, APPARENTLY.

When "responsible" needs a receipt. Horse people are wonderfully fond of a good word, particularly when it is a word that sounds as though it has been approved by a committee somewhere. We like welfare, partnership, responsibility, ethical, and, increasingly, sustainability. They are reassuring words, rather like a well-cut tweed jacket. Put one on a brochure and everything immediately looks rather more respectable.

Sustainability is particularly useful because nobody is quite sure what to do with it once it has been said. It is difficult to object to, broad enough to cover almost anything and sufficiently wholesome that disagreeing with it makes you sound as though you spend your evenings throwing plastic bottles into rivers for entertainment.

Unfortunately, words have recently acquired something rather inconvenient….. Evidence.

Since 27 September 2026, new European rules arising from the EU's Empowering Consumers for the Green Transition Directive have brought greater scrutiny to environmental and responsible-business claims made to consumers. In practical terms, if a business tells people that it is sustainable, environmentally friendly, responsible, ethical or something similarly worthy, it needs to be able to substantiate what it means.

This may prove slightly awkward for an industry which has become rather fond of photographing a horse in a sunlit field and allowing the horse to carry the entire environmental message.

The horse, naturally, has not been consulted. It is probably idly wondering whether there are carrots in the photographer's pocket.

And sometimes the photograph itself rather gives the game away. There is something faintly surreal about arriving at a major horse show in the middle of a European drought, driving past

fields that are brown, dusty and looking increasingly desperate for rain, only to find an immaculate competition arena with turf so green it appears to have been coloured in with a highlighter pen.

Somewhere beyond the showground, the surrounding countryside is conserving every drop it can find. Inside the arena, apparently, summer has been cancelled.

Perhaps the grass is perfectly sustainable. Perhaps the water comes from an entirely responsible source, the irrigation is carefully managed and the environmental cost has been measured and offset. All of that is possible, and there is nothing inherently wrong with maintaining competition surfaces safely.

But if an organisation wants to describe itself as environmentally responsible, these are exactly the sorts of questions people are increasingly entitled to ask. Because a green arena is not necessarily an environmental problem, but a green arena without anyone being able to explain how it became green might be.

The rules are not aimed specifically at horse sport, and nor should they be. They apply much more widely. But equestrianism has embraced the language of sustainability with considerable enthusiasm, and there are now sustainable yards, sustainable competitions, responsible businesses, ethical products, environmental commitments, sustainability strategies, frameworks and roadmaps.

Somewhere, I suspect, there is currently a meeting discussing the sustainability of the sustainability strategy. There will be, no doubt, reusable coffee cups.

None of this is inherently ridiculous. Horse sport has every reason to take its environmental impact seriously. We use enormous amounts of land and water, transport horses and people across countries and continents, produce rather impressive quantities of manure, consume feed and bedding, build and heat things, move equipment around and occasionally generate enough single-use plastic at a competition to make a small supermarket nervous.

We also depend rather heavily on the goodwill of the communities in which we operate.

So yes, sustainability matters.

The slightly awkward bit is that calling something responsible does not make it responsible.

Horse people understand this perfectly well when the subject is a horse. Nobody would accept an advertisement describing a horse as "exceptionally well trained" and regard the matter as settled. We would want to see the horse. We would watch it move, look at its behaviour and probably ask who trained it, how it was trained and what happened when something went wrong.

Yet when the subject changes from horses to environmental responsibility, we seem remarkably willing to take the brochure's word for it.

Call an event sustainable and we nod, call a product eco-friendly and we nod again. Tell us that a business is committed to responsible practice, preferably over a photograph containing a horse, some trees and a pleasing amount of morning mist, and we may even feel faintly virtuous about having attended.

Saz Mitchell, the owner of Willowbrook DIY Livery, recently encountered one such announcement while drinking tea in the feed room.

"So they're sustainable now?" she asked.

"Apparently." Saz took another sip of tea. "Lovely. What's the evidence?"

She looked through the open door towards the yard.

Three overflowing wheelie bins were standing beside the feed room. Her old Bedford TK horse lorry was casually seeping oil from the rear axel into the ground. A tap was dripping steadily into a bucket. Someone had left the floodlights burning in the indoor school, despite it being broad daylight, and one of the liveries had apparently discovered that empty feed bags could be used as temporary storage for absolutely everything except feed.

There followed the sort of silence normally associated with a horse refusing to load.

"Still a work in progress," someone eventually said.

Saz nodded. "Ah. Sustainability."

The interesting thing about the new rules is that they may force the industry towards precisely the sort of conversation Saz was having, whether it likes it or not.

How much water does the yard actually use? What happens to its waste? How much energy does it consume? Where do its products come from? How are the horses managed? What environmental risks have been identified? What has actually changed, and how would anyone know?

These are not especially glamorous questions.

There is no obvious Instagram opportunity in repairing a leaking tap. Nobody has ever bought a glossy magazine because they were desperate to see an annual water-consumption spreadsheet. A photograph of a beautifully planted arena perimeter is considerably more attractive than a photograph of the drainage system beneath it, even though the latter may tell you rather more about how responsibly the place is actually being run.

Real sustainability is frequently rather dull, which may be one of its least marketable qualities. It involves repairing things rather than replacing them, reducing unnecessary journeys, managing manure properly, using less water, buying more carefully, protecting the land and keeping records accurate enough that somebody can work out whether any of it actually made a difference. None of this photographs particularly well. A leaking tap being repaired is not going to produce the same engagement as a horse cantering through a golden field at sunset, and I have yet to see anyone build an Instagram campaign around a well-managed muck heap, although perhaps that is simply a gap in the market.

There is something rather reassuring about bringing sustainability down to this level, because it puts it back into the practical world in which most horse people already spend their lives. The things that genuinely make a difference are often the things nobody notices: the yard that has quietly reduced its water use, the organiser who has worked out how to stop sending lorry loads of rubbish to landfill, the competition venue that has invested in drainage rather than simply watering the arena every time somebody important is due to arrive, or the business that has looked honestly at where its products come from and decided that some of them need to change. None of these things require a drone shot or a sustainability ambassador. They require somebody to notice that something isn't working and then actually do something about it.

The equestrian world has spent years learning that saying the horse is fine is no longer considered sufficient evidence that the horse is fine. People want to see the horse, watch how it moves and understand how it is trained and managed. Increasingly, they want to know what happens when nobody is watching, because a horse can look magnificent in the collecting ring while having a rather different life once the lorry doors are shut.

Sustainability is beginning to face much the same scrutiny. It isn't really enough to say that you care, and having a beautifully designed sustainability strategy sitting on a website is not quite the same thing as having changed what happens on Tuesday morning.

Perhaps that is actually a useful development. The more the industry is required to explain what it means when it describes itself as sustainable, responsible or environmentally conscious, the less room there is for the sort of vague language that sounds impressive while carefully avoiding saying anything measurable. How much water do you use? Where does it come from? What happens to the waste? How far are everything and everybody being transported? What have you changed, and has it made any difference? These are not terribly exciting questions, but they are the questions that turn a nice idea into something somebody can actually examine.

Horse sport is already discovering that the public is becoming less interested in being told that everything is fine and considerably more interested in seeing evidence that it is. Welfare has brought us there, safeguarding is taking us further, and social licence has made the conversation considerably harder to avoid. Sustainability is simply another member of the committee, although hopefully one that brings the minutes and remembers to circulate them afterwards.

Words still matter, of course. They tell people what we believe and what we aspire to achieve, and there is nothing wrong with aspiration. But an aspiration is not an outcome, a strategy is not a result, and a photograph of a horse standing beneath an oak tree is not, unfortunately, a carbon audit. Perhaps the next stage of equestrian sustainability will therefore be less about telling everybody how responsible we are and more about being able to show them what we have actually done, even when what we have done is rather less photogenic than the horse beneath the oak tree.

Because sustainability, rather like good horsemanship, tends to hold up rather better when somebody starts looking closely at the details. A horse will eventually tell you whether you're doing it properly. A brochure, rather less helpfully, will tell you whatever you put in it.