“The nature of competition is to increase the level of challenge or difficulty, which comes into direct conflict with the concept of minimizing suffering. To be good at competition, you need to work harder and practice more often, which is likely to involve placing more frequent demands on the horse.” (Jones & McGreevy, 2010, pp. 200-201)
I love horse showing. I love hanging out with my horse all day. I love the rush of competing. I’ll be honest ‒ I love winning. But I am not convinced my horse shares my zeal.
Every way I try to think this one through, the reality is that this is my thing, not hers. Let us just pretend that I can face that hard truth – where my equine welfare scientist self meets my competitive self head-on in a cognitive dissonance meltdown. Given that, how terrible can it be? I put on my scientist spectacles and dug into the research.
What is stress?
Although there are many definitions of stress, most agree that stress has more to do with one’s appraisal and response to a threatening or challenging event than it does to the event itself (known as a stressor). It is then the perception of threat that becomes critical, regardless of whether the stressor poses an actual danger. This is key in our consideration of equine stress, as many situations that seem benign to us (a small, billowing white plastic bag comes to mind) may still pose a perceived threat to our horse.
How stressful is too stressful?
Undoubtedly, competition is stressful for horses. Competition is associated with a temporary increase in cortisol concentrations, elevated heart rate, and changes in many other physiological indicators of stress (Becker-Birck et al., 2013; Cravana et al., 2010). Exercise also increases these physiological parameters, so it is not always clear whether elevated markers are due to the psychological stress of competition or simply the physical exertion. However, one study noted that these physiological changes for dressage horses and show jumpers occurred not only during competition, but also while horses were being tacked up, indicating an anticipatory stress response (Becker-Birck et al., 2013).
Other research has found that while cortisol and heart rate increase substantially (about 90%) from pre-to-post exercise at home, this jumps to 150% – 360% increase at the horse show – an increase the authors suggest is a result of the additional psychological stress of competition, since the exercise itself did not change (Munk et al., 2017; Becker-Birk et al, 2013; Peters et al., 2013).
But how stressful is too stressful? Momentary stress can be beneficial, such as when it mobilizes the immune system to fend off an infection, motivates us to conquer problems, or ignites a horse to flee a predator. For humans, at least, short-term stress can often leave us energized and satisfied (Myers & DeWall, 2020), but extreme or prolonged stress can have negative health consequences.
Equitation science researchers Bidda Jones and Paul McGreevy comment that we set out extraordinary challenges for competition horses because the goal of winning exceeds notions of fun or even success. Rather, it requires that we outperform our competitors, and so demands increasingly greater challenges – more intense, longer, harder training of increasing difficulty – more travel, more social isolation, changing environments, fluctuating feeding schedules, disrupted social groups, and increasingly taxing performances (2010).
Horses are evolutionarily hard-wired to keep their suffering close to their chest and many signs of stress are not outwardly obvious.
Most of us reading this article feel we know when our horses are stressed. We can see overt behavioural signs of stress (pacing and/or whinnying in the stall, deteriorating performance in the ring, and conflict behaviours such as shying, bolting, bucking, and so on.) When we know our horses well, we also catch more subtle signs of stress (small behavioural differences, a little fussier about tacking up, focus is slightly off under saddle, and so on).
What we don’t know is if our horses are stressed when there are no outward signs of their discomfort. Horses are evolutionarily hard-wired to keep their suffering close to their chest (you don’t want a predator to note that you are the one who is feeling poorly), and many signs of stress are not outwardly obvious.
In her study Poker Face: Discrepancies in behaviour and affective states in horses during stressful handling procedures, Carole Ijichi found that horses would willingly comply with a stressful procedure (being led over a plastic tarp or walking underneath plastic streamers) while showing marked increases in several physiological stress indicators (increased heart rate, eye temperature, cortisol levels, etc.), and equally elevated as much more outwardly reactive and volatile horses (2018). Indeed, she found no correlation between horse’s physiological markers of stress and their willingness to comply, suggesting that horses outward behavioural reactions do not always tell us the whole story.
Following is some of what I dug up about potential stressors for show horses, and what factors might offer them greater resilience to buffer them.
Potential risk factors
Transportation
The jury is still out on the stressful impact of transportation; results are not uniformly consistent, the research is limited, and sample sizes are necessarily small (transport rigs and show horses are not the most accessible research materials and subjects). Results depend on horses’ transport experience, age, personality, transport duration, and the management of transport itself. That said, although seasoned show horses seem to cope with transportation seamlessly, transport may be more stressful than horses let on.
University of Kentucky researchers Erica Jacquay and her group found that serum cortisol, salivary cortisol, and heart rate increased in all 11 of the study horses (both young and old) after a one-hour 20-minute road trip, even though all horses were experienced travelers (2023). Similarly, a four-hour road trip for 10 Italian transport-savvy show horses triggered an acute stress response evidenced by several physiological markers, yet the horses exhibited no outward signs of discomfort, sweating, or any other behavioural markers (Arfuso et al., 2023). More Poker Faces.
Having jump-offs tagged on to the end of a clear round, although less exciting for spectators, may be in the horse’s best welfare interests.
Training intensity and difficulty of the task
Ewa Jastrzębska found evidence of both conflict behaviours (head shaking, pulling the reins, tail swishing, refusals, bucking, bolting etc.) and increased salivary cortisol concentrations after competition, (both considered a response to stress). Conflict behaviours increased as the courses became more demanding and when horses waited before performing a second class or jump-off round (Jastrzebska et al, 2017).
Horse show managers take note; having jump-offs tagged on to the end of a clear round, although less exciting for spectators (and therefore unlikely to be popular with sponsors), may be in the horse’s best welfare interests.
Discipline
Dressage has often been ear-marked as the most stressful discipline (at least in comparison to hunters or jumpers; we will leave Tennessee Walking horses out of the equation for now) and some research suggests that this is so. Rikke Munk and colleagues found that dressage horses’ baseline cortisol levels were higher than those of show jumpers both at home and at the horse show, and the increase in cortisol due to exercise was more pronounced for dressage horses than show jumpers (2017).
Since all the horses were warmbloods (Hanoverian, Oldenburg, Holstein, Danish, or Dutch Warmblood), it is not clear whether this difference was due to variation in genetic blood lines, different management and training strategies, or both. It has always been a puzzle to me why we speak in soft voices at dressage shows when there is a cacophony of music, noise, and activity at a hunter/jumper show – yet we are all competing the same breed of horse.
Duration of horse show
It was my belief that horses needed to settle in at a show; although horses, especially inexperienced horses, may be initially stressed, they get into the horse show zone, learn their job, and eventually adapt over consecutive days of horse showing. However, longer horse shows may be more stressful for horses than we presume, for both youngsters and seasoned campaigners.
Rikke Munk’s equine research subjects (young, inexperienced dressage horses and show-jumpers), at three different horse shows, showed increasing physiological markers of stress with each consecutive day of a three-day horse show (2017). The results suggest that even though horses may appear to adjust (there is that Poker Face again), their outward behavioural responses may belie the real duress they are experiencing.
Similarly, Thailand researcher Thita Wonghanchao (2024) found that consecutive horse showing days can also be a strain for older, experienced show-jumpers who exhibited higher physiological markers of stress on the second consecutive day of showjumping than on the first.
Sadly, most working horses have ulcers, and as the work increases, so do prevalence rates… temporarily easing the training regime and pasture turn-out with company will cure ulcers in a matter of days.
Competition and ulcers
The typical sport horse diet of grain and forage of high quality, and necessarily limited quantity, is problematic for horses who evolved to spend most of their time budgets grazing, leaving them vulnerable to Equine Gastric Ulcer Syndrome (EGUS). Designed to have a consistently full gut, horses produce gastric juices constantly (about 34 litres of acidic fluid per day!). When there is no alkaline saliva to buffer the stomach acid, the pH in the stomach and large intestine decreases, resulting in erosion of the protective stomach and/or intestine tissue (UC Davis Veterinary Medicine, 2025; Moeller et al., 2008; Wickens & Heleski, 2010). Indeed, the association between an empty stomach and the formation of ulcers is so reliable that food deprivation is used as a mechanism for creating ulceration in research animals (Murray & Eichorn 1996; Murray, Eichorn, and Jeffrey 2001).
Clinical signs of ulcers include weight loss, poor appetite, listless performance, depression, and gastrointestinal discomfort. However, symptoms can be sufficiently subtle as to go undetected (Murray, Eichorn, & Jeffrey 2001; Murray 2004).
Sadly, most working horses have ulcers, and as the work increases, so do prevalence rates. Horses in high-intensity training like race or sport horses typically show prevalence rates of 80% and greater (Zhou et al. 2024; Chinkangsadarn et al., 2025; Hardy et al. 2025). In a 2022 study of Korean Thoroughbred racehorses where a gastroscopy was performed within two days after racing, the prevalence of ulcers was 100% (Hyeshin Hwang et al, 2022). More surprising is the high prevalence of EGUS in pleasure horses – 59% – 40%, even in healthy horses exhibiting no symptoms (Niedźwiedź, et al., 2013; Luthersson, 2009).
Ulcer risk is elevated for show horses; exercise increases gastric acids and decreases blood flow to the gastro-intestinal tract. Exercise can also cause stomach acids to splash up into the upper, more vulnerable part, of the stomach. Both competition and exercise frequency of ≥ 6 xs per week have been identified as a key risk factors for ulcers (Pederson et al., 2018).
Ulcers are also exacerbated by grain rich diets, transport stress, and frequent administration of NSAIDS (anti-inflamatory medications), all of which are common experiences for show horses (UC Davis Veterinary Medicine, 2025). Furthermore, the necessarily increased confinement, absence of socializing and limited foraging opportunities imposed by competition, to say nothing of the stress of competition itself, creates the perfect storm for manufacturing ulcers.
In a seminal study, researchers found that exposing horses to a simulated horse show environment (four-hour transport to the new site, three days of housing without turnout in an unfamiliar environment, ridden exercise twice daily, and four-hour transport home) reliably produced ulceration in horses without pre-existing ulcers in less than 5 days. Controls, who stayed at home remained ulcer free (McClure et al., 2005).
The prevention and cure of ulcers is straightforward, although not easily afforded to most sport horses; temporarily easing the training regime and pasture turn-out with company will cure ulcers in a matter of days.
Many stables routinely put horses on ulcer medication throughout the showing season (Omeprazole ® or Gastroguard ®, which suppress gastric acid secretion and increase gastric juice pH, are standard, effective treatments). However, most researchers concur that medication is at best a temporary fix and needs to be accompanied by substantial management changes to promote ulcer healing and prevent reoccurrence (e.g. Sutton 2014).
How do we make it better?
Once again (it seems that all my writing ends up here) I arrive back at the 3Fs of Friends, Forage, and Freedom – a now internationally-recognized terminology first coined by our own Canadian equine scientist and equine behaviour guru Lauren Fraser.
In their study of 56 French elite sport horses (jumpers and eventing horses) competing at the FEI level, Romane Phelipon found considerable variability in terms of horses’ accessibility to the 3Fs. (Phelipon et al., 2024). The study highlights the fact that meeting the 3Fs, even for internationally competing sport horses, is unequivocally doable: 43% of the horses had unlimited access to forage; 61% had at least some turn-out, and 14% had tactile contact with another horse or horses. Furthermore, it is crucial.
The competition horses in the study whose 3F needs were being met were also those that showed virtually no behavioural indications of poor welfare (stereotypies, aggression, hyper-vigilance, and so on). The more the 3Fs were restricted, the more welfare was compromised. The study also dispelled several myths about why it is not feasible to provide the 3Fs for high-performance athletes. There was no evidence that ad-libitum forage nor pasture turn-out contributed to higher body condition scores. (The right kind of forage does not have to make working horses obese and most horses, once they trust that forage will always be there, self-regulate).
Also, horses who had tactile contact with other horses did not have a higher incidence of injury. Indeed, these horses had fewer skin abrasions than those living exclusively in stalls with no social interaction, suggesting that the frustration of isolation was leading these horses to engage in self-mutilation behaviours (Phelipon et al., 2024).
Phelipon’s findings are robust – i.e. these results have been repeated many times, in many countries, with many researchers, at many institutions, with many horses, and the findings are consistent. Horses need tactile contact with other horses, free-choice access to forage, and lots of time outside of the stall to meet their most basic welfare needs. Some argue that horses will only learn to adapt to horse show life by mirroring these conditions at home.
I posed this argument to renowned equitation science researcher and new collaborator with the FEI Equine Welfare Strategy Initiative, Andrew MacLean, in a podcast we did for the International Society for Equitation Science. He remarked that in fact the opposite is true; the more these natural behaviours are afforded at home, the greater will be horses’ security and resourcefulness to handle the temporary social and freedom limitations of a horseshow.
As a competitive rider, I know that I will always make a greater ask of my horse than she would ever make of herself. Although I believe she makes her best effort to rise to the task at hand, I am under no illusions that she bathes in the glory of achieving her personal best every time she steps inside those little white fences. I feel somewhat reassured in that, in return, I have made her life considerably cushier than it would be toughing it out on the range. (Indeed, I don’t think I will be returning Farah to the wild any time soon). Yet given the choice of an hour in the dressage arena, or eating grass with her equine friends, my horse, like any horse, would not choose me.
“Because the justification for our use of horses is weak, we have a strong moral obligation to ensure that we do everything we can to minimize any negative effects on their welfare.”
Bidda Jones and Paul McGreevy suggest that we look at sport horse competition with the cost-benefit approach common to determining the ethical use of animals in research (putting aside momentarily our personal values about using any animals for research purposes). Ethics committees assess proposals based on the procedures that will be carried out on animals and their impact against the likely benefits of their research. If the welfare cost to the animal is high, the justification in terms of potential benefits to humanity must also be high. Therefore, procedures that cause an animal significant pain, suffering, or distress are disallowed unless there is a strong justification for doing so and no alternative exists.
When we take this approach to the use of horses in sport, the justification for doing so (to have fun) is arguably low, which means that the welfare cost to the animal must also be low. As Jones and McGreevy note, “because the justification for our use of horses is weak, we have a strong moral obligation to ensure that we do everything we can to minimize any negative effects on their welfare (2010;p. 200).”
Undoubtedly, we are the main beneficiaries in this relationship that we have with sport horses, and our responsibility must go beyond simply meeting their basic needs. As equitation scientist and chair of the FEI Equine Ethics and Well Being Commission Natalie Waran says, although humans and horses come to competition with very different perspectives, “we have the shared goal to live a good life.” (Waran et al., 2023)
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A Fair Ask for Sport Horses: Bringing the Science to the Boots in the Barn takes a deep dive into the psychology of equine behaviour to explore what our horses need to ensure good welfare, where we are meeting those needs, where we are falling short, and what we might do better. Details regarding how to order will be provided when available.
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