08/03/2026

IHP Italian Horse Protection opposes the nomination of Italy’s “Equestrian Arts, Traditions and Cultures” as UNESCO intangible cultural heritage, a process initiated with the signing at CNEL of a memorandum of understanding and the establishment of a promoting committee.

For IHP, this initiative—presented as the enhancement of “arts”, “traditions” and “culture”—risks turning into an institutional legitimization of practices that, in reality, involve using the animal as a tool: performance-oriented training, restraint, transport, stress and, above all, an all-too-often opaque fate when a horse is no longer “useful”.

“We find it astonishing that in 2026 what is, in practice, exploitation is being proposed as UNESCO intangible heritage. In whatever discipline or context it is framed, the horse is an animal forced to do what it would never choose to do. There is nothing ‘artistic’ or ‘cultural’ here: there are coercive tools, unnatural restraint methods, constant movement, and management built around human needs, not the animal’s. And then there is the point everyone avoids: what happens at the end, when the horse is no longer needed. The idea that all this could be certified as ‘heritage’ is a very serious signal of the ethical drift we are sliding into,” says IHP President Sonny Richichi.

IHP considers it unacceptable that a UNESCO nomination process be structured without placing at its core—substantially, not rhetorically—a simple question: who truly protects the horse within systems that use it for sport, entertainment and human activities?

The protocol signed at CNEL—as described by its promoters—has been presented as a “historic day” for the equestrian world and as the formal start of the nomination. For IHP, instead, it marks the beginning of an operation that risks rewriting reality: calling “culture” what depends on coercion and the animal’s subordination shifts attention from welfare to celebration.

IHP opposes the nomination and calls on institutions to halt this process, because its premise—elevating to cultural heritage practices based on exploitation—is incompatible with a modern idea of civilization, protection and responsibility toward animals.