10/04/2026

On 2 April, a Memorandum of Understanding was signed between the Italian Equestrian Sports Federation (FISE – Federazione Italiana Sport Equestri) and the National Association of Italian Municipalities (ANCI – Associazione Nazionale dei Comuni Italiani), with the stated objective of promoting the spread of equestrian sports across the national territory and strengthening collaboration between sports institutions and local administrations. A piece of news that passed almost unnoticed in the daily flow of information. And yet it contains a contradiction that deserves to be highlighted.

A Partnership That Has Not Read the Science

IHP responded with a formal letter addressed to the President and Vice-President of ANCI. Our position is clear: promoting equestrian sports today means ignoring decades of scientific research on equid ethology. Horses, donkeys and ponies have biological and behavioural characteristics that are structurally incompatible with the practices to which they are subjected in this context: stabled management (gestione scuderizzata), breaking (doma), training with coercive instruments — bits (imboccature), harnesses (finimenti), spurs, whips — and the obligation to perform and compete in activities whose purpose they cannot even comprehend. The welfare of a horse is not measured in hay rations and veterinary visits: it coincides with freedom of movement in large spaces around the clock, herd life (vita in branco), and the ability to graze. All of which equestrian sports, in their current structure, do not guarantee and often deny.

Defining as a "sport" a discipline in which one of the participants is compelled to take part is, in itself, a linguistic problem that reflects a deeper problem of perspective.

The Unresolved Issue: Horses at the End of Their Career

There is a question that the FISE-ANCI Protocol does not ask itself, and that IHP has been asking for years without receiving an answer: what becomes of horses when they are no longer usable? When they are elderly, injured, ill — and may live for many more years — who takes responsibility for them?

The answer, in the vast majority of cases, is: no one, in any structured way. With very rare exceptions among conscientious owners, those horses end up in the hands of dealers. And from there, when it is no longer possible to recycle them into other activities, they are sent to slaughter (macello). This is a well-known, documented mechanism that IHP has been denouncing for nearly twenty years. Italy is the country that slaughters the highest number of horses in the whole of Europe. Data from the Ministry of Health (Ministero della Salute) speak for themselves: in 2025, 22,854 equids were slaughtered (abbattuti), of which over 14,700 were of domestic origin. By the end of February 2026, 1,926 horses had already been slaughtered. Promoting the equestrian sector without addressing this figure is equivalent to supporting a system that structurally produces animal by-products (scarti animali).

What We Expected from ANCI

IHP does not dispute ANCI's right to enter into agreements with sports bodies. It disputes the direction: in a country with these figures, with a significant phenomenon of illegal racing (corse clandestine) and unlawful slaughter (macellazioni abusive), and with a bill before Parliament that for the first time debates the legal status of equids, the association representing Italian municipalities had the opportunity to take a different course. Not to promote the use of horses, but to encourage knowledge of these animals in a manner respectful of their ethological nature (natura etologica): education initiatives, contact spaces free from coercion, alternative models to those based on exploitation.

It would have been a sign of institutional modernity.

The Letter and the Next Step

IHP wrote to ANCI calling for a revision of the Protocol and declared itself available to provide evidence, documentation and scientific arguments built on nearly twenty years of field investigation and reporting. This is not a polemical gesture: it is an attempt to open a dialogue that, to date, the world of horse racing (ippica) and the sports federation have never truly been willing to have.

Public opinion, especially among younger generations, is increasingly attentive to the issue of animal rights and increasingly critical of models based on their use. Ignoring this evolution — and instead sealing agreements that move in the opposite direction — is a choice that Italian municipalities risk having to explain.