No Room at the Yard

When the welfare safety net starts to sag.

Everyone likes the of the idea of a safety net, particularly when somebody else is holding it.

We like knowing that there are charities, rescue centres, sanctuaries and rehoming organisations somewhere in the background, ready to step in when an owner can no longer cope, a horse becomes too difficult to manage, a field disappears beneath a flood, or somebody discovers that the £3,000 horse they bought in a moment of optimism requires considerably more than £3,000 to keep alive.

It is comforting. It is also rather easy to forget that the people holding the net have to live underneath it too.

The latest survey from the National Equine Welfare Council has produced the sort of numbers

that ought to make the horse world sit up slightly straighter. All of the organisations responding to the survey are now at or near capacity, with around 4,500 equines collectively in their care. Half are already at or above capacity, while the rest are close behind. At the same time, 81% have seen an increase in requests from owners wanting to hand over equines, 67% have seen more welfare concern calls, and fewer horses are leaving through rehoming.

It is, in other words, becoming rather difficult to get into the place where the horse is supposed to go when everything else has gone wrong.

This is not because the people running these organisations have suddenly become less enthusiastic about horses. Quite the opposite. They are being squeezed from several directions at once. Hay prices have more than doubled over the past five years, veterinary and energy costs have risen, site maintenance is more expensive, donations are becoming harder to secure and the weather has not exactly been helping. Wet winters have damaged grazing, summer drought has eaten into forage stocks and the cost of keeping a horse who cannot simply be turned out with the others continues to climb. More than 90% of respondents said they were concerned about the impact of the cost-of-living crisis, while 63% had received fewer large donations and 65% were finding major donors harder to secure.

Dr Leila Al-Farsi, CEO of the World Equestrian Welfare Organisation, has spent enough time dealing with equine welfare to have developed the particular expression of a woman who has just been shown a PowerPoint presentation containing the words strategic opportunity.

At a recent WEWO meeting, she was sitting towards the back of the room while a consultant explained that the current welfare landscape presented both "significant challenges and exciting opportunities for collaborative solutions". On the screen behind him was a graph showing the number of horses requiring assistance rising steadily upwards, while another line representing available places in welfare centres appeared to be doing very little at all.

Leila studied it for some time.

"So," she said eventually, "more horses."

The consultant smiled. "Yes."

"Fewer places."

"Yes."

"More expensive to keep."

"Yes."

Leila looked at the next slide, which was entitled Building a Sustainable Welfare Ecosystem.

There were three concentric circles.

"Excellent," she said. "Where are the horses going?"

The consultant paused. "That's what we're working towards."

"I see."

Leila folded her arms.

"Are we also working towards finding them somewhere to stand?"

There was a brief silence of the sort that occurs when a meeting has reached the point at which someone has accidentally asked a useful question.

The consultant moved to the next slide. It contained the phrase stakeholder engagement.

Leila looked at it. "Can stakeholder engagement produce a stable?"

Apparently not.

"Land?"

No.

"Hay?"

There was another pause.

"No."

Leila nodded and picked up her coffee.

"Then I suggest we stop calling it a solution."

This is, perhaps, the problem with welfare. The language surrounding it has become remarkably sophisticated, while the things required to keep a horse alive remain stubbornly old-fashioned. You still need somewhere for it to stand, something for it to eat, somebody to clean up after it and enough money to pay the vet when it does something spectacularly expensive to itself at 11.47 on a Sunday night.

None of these requirements has yet responded particularly well to a framework.

Nor, unfortunately, can a rescue centre create another field by announcing a strategic partnership.

The arithmetic is becoming rather difficult to ignore. The NEWC survey* found that more than half of responding organisations have already reduced the number of equines they take in, while more than a third have introduced stricter intake criteria. More than a third have undergone restructuring, and two centres are facing planned or guaranteed closure. Importantly, the organisations surveyed were also clear that they were not prepared to solve the financial problem by quietly lowering welfare standards. Most said they would not reduce forage, switch to cheaper forage or cut bedding to save money.

Which leaves a rather unpleasant question hanging in the air.

If the welfare organisations cannot take the horse, who does?

There is a tendency in the horse world to regard welfare cases as belonging to somebody else. The rescue centre's problem. The charity's problem. The RSPCA's problem. The council's problem. The person down the road who keeps twelve horses in a field and has somehow acquired another three.

Until, of course, it becomes our problem.

Perhaps this is why the figures are more uncomfortable than they initially appear. They are not really telling us that rescue centres need more money, although they plainly do. They are telling us that the whole system is becoming less forgiving.

An owner who is struggling financially has fewer places to turn. A rescue centre that is full has fewer places to offer. A horse that cannot be rehomed takes up a stable for longer. A horse that stays longer costs more. A centre that spends more needs more money, just as the number of people able to give that money is becoming smaller.

It is not quite a vicious circle, but it is certainly a very tired-looking one.

World Horse Welfare has also reported its busiest summer ever for welfare concerns and enquiries. During June and July, 911 people contacted the charity with concerns about horses, compared with 607 in the same period last year, while its welfare team gave advice in 448 cases, more than double the previous year's figure. Field Officers attended 635 welfare concerns, an increase of nearly 30%. World Horse Welfare

Those numbers represent actual horses, of course, rather than colourful pie charts in a conference presentation.

There will have been somebody standing in a field looking at a horse and wondering what on earth they were going to do next, and somebody at the other end of the telephone trying to work it out with them.

This is the part of welfare that tends to disappear behind the photographs of happy rehomings. We see the pony arrive, thin and frightened, then six months later we see the same pony standing in a field looking marvellous with a child hanging off its neck and a caption about second chances.

We like the second chance.

We are less comfortable with the bit where somebody has to fund the first one.

The rescue sector has always depended on an extraordinary amount of goodwill, but goodwill is not a currency accepted by the hay merchant. Neither does it pay the vet when an elderly cob develops a problem, replace the fencing after a storm or provide another acre or two when the ones you already have are full.

Perhaps, then, responsible horse ownership needs to become slightly less romantic.

It is not simply about being able to afford a horse today. It is about having thought reasonably hard about what happens if the horse becomes old, injured, unrideable, expensive or simply inconvenient. It is about understanding that breeding another foal creates a future animal who will eventually need somewhere to live, and that selling a horse is not the same thing as making its future someone else's problem.

The welfare organisations themselves are now pointing towards responsible breeding, responsible ownership and forward planning as part of the answer, because there is only so much pressure that can be absorbed at the rescue end of the system.

This is not particularly fashionable advice. Nobody has ever bought a horse because the advert said Excellent long-term financial planning opportunity, but perhaps it should sit somewhere between choosing the saddle and deciding which colour of quarter sheet looks best. The uncomfortable truth about a safety net is that it only works if there is somewhere for the net to stretch. At the moment, the people holding it are telling us that their arms are getting tired, and perhaps we should listen before we discover that the horse falling through it is our own.

There may come a point when the answer to "Can you take him?" is not a sympathetic voice at the end of the telephone, but a very polite woman saying, "I'm sorry. We're full."

And there is no more frightening welfare problem than a horse with nowhere left to go. The NEWC survey* https://newc.co.uk/rescue-rehoming-and-sanctuaries-survey-2026/