Changing Rein

What if the problem in equestrian sport isn't the riders who make the headlines, but the culture that produced them?
In December, five-star eventer Matt Brown and FEI dressage rider Cecily Clark posted an open letter to the equestrian world. It struck a nerve — thousands of reactions and a flood of private messages from people who'd felt the same unease but thought they were the only one.
In this episode, the husband-and-wife team behind East West Training Stables sit down with Karen and Meta to talk about what it really costs to compete at the top, and why Matt describes being named an Olympic alternate as one of the lowest moments of his career. Together they move the conversation away from singling out individuals and toward something harder to look at: the culture we've built around competition, and the things we've simply grown to accept.
Along the way they explore the horses who've gone quiet in the warm-up ring — shut down, chins to their chests — the education gap that leaves even professionals unsure how a horse actually sees the world, and why choosing the slower, kinder path so often feels like failure long before it feels like progress.
An honest, generous conversation about welfare, culture, and change — and why none of us needs to be perfect to start trying to do better.
📩 Read the open letter that started it all

"It's in their constitution to be injured."
"We've bred them to be like this."
Both of these came up in the same conversation — and the paradox sitting between them is one of the patterns Jessie McCarthy's research surfaces about how racing talks to itself about risk.
In this week's episode, Karen and Meta sit down with Jessie McCarthy, a final-year veterinary student at the University of Surrey, with a Master's in Animal Welfare, Ethics and Law from the University of Glasgow. Her recently published paper, co-authored with Euan Bennett and Heather Cameron-Whytock, takes a less common approach to social licence in racing: rather than starting from outside the sport, she interviewed twelve insiders about how they perceive the risks horses face, and the language they reach for when things go wrong.
What emerges is a quietly revealing portrait of a sport in conversation with itself. Risk often gets reframed as a communication problem rather than a welfare one.
Responsibility gets dispersed across the sport — until, as Jessie's research shows, it often quietly settles on the horses themselves. Their fragility. Their nature. Their breeding.
But of course — we bred them.
In this conversation, we explore:
Why the words we reach for ("accident," "incident," "adverse event") shape what we believe is possible
How tradition and identity in the horse world can act as a brake on reform
Pin firing, generational change, and what the next generation of equine vets is choosing differently
Why a horse's welfare may be shaped less by race day than by the other 360 days
The question of equine consent — and why only one of twelve stakeholders raised it
And, offered any wish in the world, Jessie's is gloriously simple: more turnout, more friends, more forage
A thoughtful, generous conversation with a young vet whose research invites the horse world — insiders and outsiders alike — to reflect on the stories we've inherited.
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📧 [email protected]
#ChangingRein #EquineWelfare #SocialLicence #Racing

We love our animals. But is that enough?
Captive animal welfare specialist Georgina Groves joins Karen and Meta for a conversation about the uncomfortable gap between what we know about animal welfare and what we actually do.
Georgina's work takes her into some of the world's most under-resourced zoos — but the parallels she draws for horse people are striking. Stables that haven't meaningfully changed in a century. Animals who've forgotten how to be their own species. A health-centric idea of care that protects the body while quietly constraining the life.
This is an episode about welfare washing, moral duty, and the difference between caring for an animal and caring about one.
Featuring the story of four bears who had to relearn how to be bears — and what that might mean for the horses in our care.
🎧 Listen in, then join the conversation.
Guest: Georgina Groves, captive animal welfare specialist and co-founder of Wild Welfare
Hosts: Dr Karen Luke and Meta Osborne
GEORGINA'S LINKEDIN POSTLINK TO WILD WELFARE

Erica Cheung is a horse owner, mixed-practice (including equine) vet clinic co-owner, and PhD candidate living in rural central Alberta, Canada. She obtained a Bachelor of Science from the University of Alberta, a Master of Science in clinical animal behaviour, and is currently studying under the supervision of Professor Daniel Mills and Dr. Beth Ventura for her PhD at the University of Lincoln, UK. She has lectured at the University of Alberta on One Health, animal behaviour and welfare. Her PhD work is focused on the sociocultural factors that may influence how performance horses are trained and managed.

What happens when you look — really look — at how dressage is judged?
In this episode of Changing Rein, PhD researcher Cristina Wilkins shares a finding that genuinely surprised us: the Dressage Judging Guidelines mention the requirement to maintain contact 37 times — and visible rein releases are penalised. The longer the release, the greater the penalty.
For anyone trained in learning theory, that's a confronting discovery. Horses learn through pressure and release. So what happens when the release never comes?
Using extraordinary high-speed photography from fine artist Crispin Johansson — capturing up to 60 frames per second during competition — Cristina and her research team have been able to examine entire dressage tests frame by frame. What they're seeing raises important questions about the gap between what we say good training looks like and what the rules actually reward.
This conversation also explores how equipment like tight nosebands and even artificial foaming agents can mask signs of horse discomfort, and also introduces the concept of hypersensitisation - a possible explanation for why horses continue to perform even without the release that ethical training principles require.
This isn't about blame. It's about looking more closely at what's happening and asking whether the rules we ride by match the welfare outcomes we all want.
Guest: Cristina Wilkins — PhD candidate (University of New England), equitation science researcher, and co-author of multiple peer-reviewed papers on horse welfare.
Hosts: Dr Karen Luke & Meta Osborne