Last month, in September, we learned of a seemingly paradoxical situation: two horses of the Giostra dell’Orso (one of the many ’historical enactments’ which use animals, in Italy) had been kept for at least two months in stables just a few meters from a public road, in an area which was not even fenced in.

In order to verify the situation we monitored it for a few weeks, going to the site and checking out what had been reported: two horses living in boxes of 3x3 square meters, without even the possibility of looking out, with only rationed food, each with a couple of hooves shod, a couple with lost shoes.

This isolated state provokes grave problems for animals which are sociable and evolved to live in freedom. Stabling horses – a practice mainly for the convenience of owners and trainers – inflicts extremely negative effects on them, something which we should all think hard about - while most people think that a horse shut in a box is ’normal’, in actual fact horses are herd animals: they live in groups, they need wide spaces to move freely about in, and they graze for about 16 hours a day.
Depriving them of this means causing them extreme anxiety which, in some prolonged cases, ends up in manic behaviours and serious pathological states of depression.

The owner, interviewed by Edoardo Stoppa of Striscia La Notizia (see the Canale 5 transmission) tried to justify the facts by claiming that the horses were “worked on the lunge” (made to run in a circle on the end of a long rope, ed.) for half an hour a day.

Apart from the fact that there was no recent sign on the ground of horses moving over it, we consider that taking a horse out of his box for half an hour a day (therefore leaving him shut in for 23½ hours) is not a sign of respecting his basic needs.

This behaviour is all the more serious because it comes from someone who takes part in a ’historic re-enactment’, one of the many where people are more focused on the spectacle than on the animals who are, willy nilly, there to entertain the crowds, then to be forgotten completely. We ask the authorities responsible to evaluate the mistreatment of these two horses.