Equine Head to Tail by Billie Morris

01/02/2026

Katie Trust.
Katie Pledge.

There is an article in The Mail on Sunday which is rather relevant. Please find and read it.
I can’t share it on my page for some reason, but it focuses mainly on the equine world in Ireland.

There are predatory men and women in the equine world, we have all come across them. The lucky ones who have come across them will have just dismissed them and moved on. The unlucky ones will have been sucked into their, the predators, nasty world, with promises that were never kept.

This is taking place both today and in the past, not only at training events, yards, pony clubs, riding clubs but also at the livery yards where horse mad women and children keep their horses and ponies.

But in order for these predators to be made accountable for their actions, they need to be exposed and their victims supported, not ridiculed and made to feel ashamed.

In racing they have NAORS in place to protect people. There needs more to be done to protect people in the horse world in general.

01/02/2026

31/01/2026

On a different note from horses.

I have come to the realisation that walking my dog in all these storms that just keep rolling in isn’t that invigorating or exciting. Take last week for instance.

I was walking my dog and a friends dog on a track. It’s a wide track, yes it has trees and hedges on either side, but if you walked dogs regularly in my village you would understand the reasoning for this. The main reason, I would quite to live.

So, the main track was walked with no problems other than my bobble hat being ripped off twice in the wind. The dogs didn’t go airborne.

I then decided to go down a smaller track, it was pretty sheltered, nothing was strewn around. Safe. I thought. Wrong.

I was halfway down, watching my step, muddy and all that. When a single bramble appeared from nowhere, along with the wind. It attacked me numerous times, four in total I found out later. I managed to rip the damn thing out of my face, swearing at the offending thing like a sailors navvy and carried on walking. The dogs were totally unconcerned with my brush with natures scalpel. Rude I thought.

There was some dripping of blood down my coat, but hey ho. I made it on to the road at the bottom of the track, I met a neighbour in her car. She screeched to a halt at the sight of me. The horror on her face made me look round, thinking that one of the dogs had been injured. But no. It was me. My face was covered in blood, my coat, my hands, my hair, which is quite long and had decided to join in with the blood letting and finally my glasses were all covered in blood. 🩸 I looked like a victim in a horror film.

I did the walk of shame back through the village, thinking to myself that in future, in high winds I will have to suck it up with the traffic.

The dogs were fine, they enjoyed their walk. Lucky them. 🐕🐾

29/01/2026

Sharing the enormous number of horses who are sent for slaughter earlier has a ruffled a few feathers. The simple answer is don’t breed so many horses and the ones you do have, look after them.

I saw yet another advert over the weekend for a nineteen year old mare, yes she was a TB or so the advert said. She was pictured with young children onboard, and other confidence giving photos. Stating that she had many more years of work left in her. Clearly this family didn’t want her any more, whether they had lost interest in her or just couldn’t afford to keep her any longer, who knows. But I wonder where she will end up. Hopefully not on a lorry on her way to slaughter. If they can’t find someone to give her a happy retirement, surely she has earned that? I just hope that they have the decency to have her put down at home.

So many people see horses as a throw away commodity, they use them and in some, not all cases, abuse them. This is why so many healthy, young horses as well as the sick, old and generally unwanted horses end up being slaughtered. Let’s hope that the end of live export for all animals to be killed is upheld.
The ban came into force in Britain on May 24 2024. But some slimy barsteward will carry on regardless.

28/01/2026

This👇too many horses being pushed to do too much too soon. And then they wonder why the horse goes stale and starts playing up. The biggest injustice is when the horse goes wrong. It’s not his fault, it’s yours.

An open letter to influencers in the equestrian world

I’ll be blunt……

“Only her 5th time sat on.”
“My 4yo first jump.”
“So pleased with her.”

This influencers own words on the post.

That isn’t impressive. It’s alarming.

A horse that has only been sat on five times is still trying to work out how to carry a rider, balance itself, steer, stop, and process pressure. Jumping at that stage isn’t training, it’s overload. Calling it progress doesn’t change what it is.

A 4 year old horse is not physically mature. The spine and pelvis are still developing. Growth plates are still open. Jumping under saddle sends concussion through structures that aren’t ready to absorb it. You won’t see the damage today, you’ll see it in a few years when the horse is lame, sore, “difficult”, or quietly disappearing from work.

A “first jump” is not a milestone to brag about. It should be dull, small and unremarkable, poles, raised poles, tiny cross poles, loose schooling, no pressure, no rider expectation, no camera. If it looks exciting on social media, you’ve probably gone too far.

This also isn’t just physical. Mentally, this is unfair. Young horses need time to understand, not adrenaline to survive. Rushing them creates horses that try hard because they’re brave, not because they’re ready. That bravery gets used up very quickly.

If you choose to call yourself an influencer, you don’t get to shrug this off as “my horse, my choice”. People copy what you do. Kids copy it. Owners copy it. Riding schools kids copy it. And horses pay for it with shortened careers and broken bodies.

This isn’t being soft. It isn’t oh follow the animal rights movement . It’s basic, evidence based welfare, start later, go slower, protect longevity.

The industry keeps talking about horse welfare and social licence while applauding posts like this. You can’t have it both ways.

A horse’s value is not how early it jumps.
It’s how long it stays sound, willing and comfortable.

If that makes people uncomfortable, good….👍🏽

27/01/2026

Britain has a ban on exporting live animals for slaughter, this was from May 20th 2024. But we can import them? Surely the Irish government can build an abattoir on humanity grounds. I’ve seen fit racehorses on their knees after they have travelled over from Ireland via lorry and ferry. It’s such a long journey. Think what state an old, sick horse will be in when it arrives here to die. Just hope it’s not in one of those halal butcher shops.

𝐖𝐞 𝐁𝐫𝐞𝐞𝐝 𝐓𝐨𝐨 𝐌𝐚𝐧𝐲 𝐇𝐨𝐫𝐬𝐞𝐬.

These figures are Irish horses exported for slaughter, and they only cover January to September 2025 because that’s all that has been reported. This was posted on Twitter by the minister for agriculture in Ireland recently.

111 to Belgium.
573 to France.
666 to the UK.

That’s the official data. Not the full story.

The export system doesn’t clearly state purpose, but the UK figure is confirmed 666 Irish horses slaughtered there by the end of September. After that, the trail goes quiet for the moment till the next report. No updates. No breakdown what horses were what. No transparency.

So September isn’t when it stopped.
It’s where the reporting stops for now.

And I can’t help thinking what sits inside those numbers. God knows how many were retired horses, old companions, horses someone once loved. How many were labelled too sharp for an everyday rider. How many were sore or in pain, but dismissed as naughty because it was easier than looking deeper.

This isn’t just a racing problem. Racing produces around 9,000 foals a year, but sport horses, broodmares, and casual breeding add thousands more. Good horses. Useful horses. Still surplus.

I’m not pretending slaughter isn’t part of the system. With the numbers we breed, it is. What I can’t accept is the journey.

Nearly two years on from the Shannon Foods scandal in Kildare, we still don’t have a functioning equine abattoir in Ireland. No local option. No short journey. No proper oversight. So instead, horses are put on lorries and sent away, and responsibility fades with every mile.

If slaughter is happening anyway, it should happen at home, under strict welfare standards, not after hours of transport to spare us having to face it.

These aren’t just figures on a page.
They’re Irish horses…….

And the system didn’t stop just because the reporting did, people just stopped caring….

27/01/2026

A yard, with a number of boxes and land is becoming vacant later on in the year just up the road from me. I’m thinking about taking it on, I would love to retrain ex-racehorses, but I know that when the time came to send them on to their next home, I would pick holes left, right and centre in the prospective owners. Then I would end up with too many horses. So I think that is off the table. Might just go for one or two to retrain and keep them till the end. None of my horses leave me alive.

Then the other so-called brainwave is to take in liveries. I know of a few people who are not happy or their horses are not happy were they are. But do I really want the hassle?

Horses need routine, I’m quite strict on that, they need any changes occurring to them being done gradually. That to me is common sense, but unfortunately where the horse world is at the moment, there is bu**er all common sense. That would drive me up the wall. 🧱🔨

Then my last idea, would be use the yard to incorporate my skill set. To recuperate horses, give them the downtime that they need to recover from various injuries and other trauma. Every day I hear about horses having accidents which quite frankly could have been avoided. I hear about and see owners riding their horses, when the vet has specifically said no riding. Why is it so impossible to listen to the vet? If you can’t handle a fresh horse put it in a bridle. I think people are just too lazy to put in the ground work that is required to rehabilitate a horse.

27/01/2026

27/01/2026

Did you know that approximately 92% of horses going for slaughter are healthy and sound? Think about that when you send your mare to stud.

27/01/2026

Each horse is an individual. This article explains in facts the difference between feral and domesticated horses. Even though a lot of it will sail over the heads of Dunning Kruger lot.

“Horses don’t have rugs in the wild.” “They don’t have field shelters.” “They don’t get supplements.”

All true.

And they also don’t live behind fences. They don’t stand on rested paddocks with no forage left. They don’t live on improved grass bred for cows. They don’t get clipped. They don’t have their movement restricted to a few acres. They don’t get taken out of their social group and put in a stable overnight because it suits the livery yard....

Wild and feral horses survive because their whole life is built around movement, choice, weather exposure, and constant low-level adaptation. They walk for miles. They grow the coat they need. They self-regulate their diet. They seek shelter when it suits them and move away when it doesn’t.

Not all domestic horses have that setup. Even the best-kept ones. Even the “they live out 24/7” ones.

So when we say “they don’t have that in the wild,” what we’re really saying is “they wouldn’t need this if their life looked completely different.”

But it doesn’t.

Rugs, shelters, supplements aren’t about human fussiness or weakness. They’re compensations. They’re ways of filling the gaps created by domestication, management, land use, and modern horse keeping.

The mistake is comparing tools without comparing context.

Wild horses don’t need rugs. Domestic horses don’t live wild lives.

Both things can be true at the same time.

Horse care isn’t about purity or proving how little we do. It’s about noticing what this horse, in this setup, needs to stay well.

If we’re going to compare, we need to compare the whole picture. Not just the bits that win arguments on Facebook. 🐴☕