Brösarp Project

I've read the summary (supposed to be at work) and think it is fascinating. Also very obvious that even horses like mine living out in a decent sized paddock just aren't going to move as much as horses who have to travel for food and water.

Downloaded to read the rest later - thank you for sharing
 
Some really interesting insights there (especially about variation in hours spent resting between environments and the consequent effect on height and muscle), thank you for sharing.

One of the comments that struck me was:
Buyers of expensive horses will probably in the near future request documentation of how the horse was bred, a ”breeding journal”. Those who buy a horse - young or old - should be aware of what they are buying. Everyone who buys a used car can get documentation about meter readings, service opportunities, etc. It is therefore remarkable that there is usually a lack of information about how a horse has been bred or used.
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In the zoo world, there's been a lot of push for a 24hr approach to welfare - i.e. data collection to identify how animals are spending their time when we're not there, because you want them to be allocating their time like their wild counterparts do. And I've always thought that if people didn't have such a biased perception of their pets' lives - because they only know what the animal's doing when they're there - they'd be much less happy about keeping them in stables/crates for so long.

But maybe if there were such breeding journals with data on how sport horses have been allocating their time growing up, how much they've been moving, it would make owners more interested in trying to give horses similar lifestyles even once they start work.
 
Not easy to do though, with more and more land being used for housing, being able to provide enough grazing land is becoming harder all the time. Maybe the future for all livery yards is a track based system.
 
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