What is the vegan stance on horseback riding? Is riding horses cruel?
Well, get ready to get controversial!
Hi it’s Emily from Bite Size Vegan and welcome to another vegan nugget. Today’s topic is
something that I’ve been asked to cover by may of you out there, especially recently,
so I’ve been doing my research. I want to first give thanks to Fair Horsemanship for
all of her assistance and I’ll tell you how to get connected with her later in the
video.
I’m first going to address the question of whether or not riding horses is vegan and
then I’ll move onto whether it’s cruel. As I said in my video about wool, veganism,
in general, is about opposing the use of animals for our own personal gains in any form whatsoever.
If we look at horseback riding, it’s evident that horses do not need to be ridden. Horseback
riding solely benefits the rider and so it is a form of using animals for our entertainment,
which is explicitly not vegan.
Now this is not a popular stance and there are several arguments as to how riding benefits
the horse. One of these is that domesticated horses need exercise. The most simple response
to this is that domesticated dogs also need exercise, yet owners are able to provide this
without having to mount them. A second argument is that riding provides a horse with an enriched
environment. Again, this can be as easily be achieved without someone atop them by walking
the horse from the ground. A third argument is one that comes in many forms but always
starts with “By my horse loves…” and ends with: being ridden, going to shows, wearing
a bridle, having a bit, running the barrels, or what have you. And perhaps there is some
horse out there who actually likes to be ridden. But let’s take a look at what riding does
to a horse's body physically. What I’m going to cover is just a cursory look into the impact
of horseback riding on horses. I have links to additional resources in the blog post for
this video, which is linked in the video description and I urge you to reference those studies
if you want to delve deeper into his topic. Let’s start with skeletal structure. There
is a saying that a horse is ready to ride when their “knees close.” This refers
to waiting until the growth plates just above their knees convert from cartilage to bone.
Dr. Den Bennet in her article Timing And Rate Of Skeletal Maturation In Horses, states that
“what people often don’t realize is that there is a “growth plate” on either end
of every bone behind the skull, and in the case of some bones (like the pelvis or vertebrae,
which have many ‘corners’) there are multiple growth plates.” She goes on to detail the
exact schedule of growth plate conversion to bone in horses. While many people start
riding their horses around the age of 2, Dr. Bennet’s schedule shows that the last plates
to fuse are in the vertebral column- and this does not occur until the horse is at least
five and a half years old, with taller horses and males taking even longer. According to
the text Practical Anatomy and Propaedeutic of the Horse, the length of time for complete
growth of the epiphyseal plates, or cartilage, is not until they are (on average) between
6 and 9 years old!
The basic takeaway of all of that is that it's incredibly easy to damage a horse's back
and displace his or her vertebral growth plates, causing pain and lasting injury.
Aside from the issue of growth plate fusion, riding a horse at any age causes skeletal
damage as well as muscle and tissue. Expert horseman, Alexander Nevzorov states “A horse’s
back is not a seat, not a place for a human butt, not a piece of “meat”, not some
sort of “terra fir- ma”. It is a very complex and tender anatomical structure with
extraordinary functions. Besides the obvious biomechanical function, the back has another
very important function. The spinal cord’s work is to guarantee that the responses from
the entire nervous system can communicate the senses of taste, smell, vision, hearing,
and vestibular function to the brain, not to get lost in too much detail. On this especially
vulnerable, sensitive organ, onto the medulla spinalis, the brain of the back, sits a rider.”
In a 2007 study out of the 295 horses who were considered physically sound upon initial
examination, 91.5% were diagnosed with some kind of alteration on the spinal processes
after X-ray. Almost always the spinal processes of the caudal saddle position were affected.
In horseback riding, the spinal damage caused by weight alone is compounded by the use of
saddles, harnesses, bits, and whips. Saddles restrict blood flow to the arterial capillary
bed causing tissue damage, as well as general wear and chafing. But nothing is quite as
cruel as the use of bits and whips- which I’m only going to give a cursory nod to
in this video.
Bits cause pain and damage to a horse’s complex cranial nerves as well as their teeth,
tongue and palate. Facial nerves are extremely close to the skin and thus extremely sensitive.
It is essential to understand that there is absolutely no way to use a bit without a horse
feeling pain.
And since I’m running short on time here, I’ll just say this about using a whip: it’s
a whip!
Now all of this is just barely scraping the surface of the horse issue. I haven’t even
addressed the practice of breaking horses, horse racing, the rodeo and other topics and
I'll cover those in future videos.
Give the video a thumbs up if you likes it and please share it around with your friends
and family. And if you’re new to the channel, I’d love to have you subscribe- here at
BSV I address all aspect of veganism and aways in 5 minutes or less. Now go live vegan and
I’ll see you soon!