Christa Lesté-Lasserre

Okay, I’m really not trying to mooch off a 2000s TV series also based on a journalist. I would have thought of the title anyway. If I’d really wanted to play with that show title, I would have written: horSes and the City.

That said… The thing is, I really do believe that horses could be the new green energy of the future, if we gave them a chance. Yes, it makes everything slower, I know. But you know what? I could go with slow, honestly. I’m not saying it’s realistic at the moment, but I’d sure like it to be. The speed of modern life is killing us every bit as much as the pollution is.

My new publication in the November 2019 issue of Cheval Magazine is about having horses in the city again. I checked with authorities, and horses are even allowed inside Paris–on the condition that riders don’t get off and lead them by hand because that converts them from vehicles into livestock, and that’s not allowed.

One of my sources, the president of the French Society for Working Equids (SFET), had some great insight about reintroducing horses into the city. (SFET has a fascinating second website, in English, on “horse energy” in today’s world.) First, President Eric Rousseaux said it’s important to consider their presence as progress, not regression. In other words, we can move forward with using horse power with a modern view and modern knowledge and technology (which can include electric-supported wagons), as well as a better insight into equine health and welfare, instead of seeing this as a return to the old past.

Secondly, he said we as horse people need to be careful about reintroducing the horses in the cities, as people aren’t used to this. We need to make sure things go smoothly so the horses are accepted and that people have a positive image of this idea. We need to be courteous and polite–essentially make friends, not enemies, with the communities. After all, we always have to keep in mind that even when the law says we have the right to work with our horses in the cities, we can’t forget this critical point: especially when it comes to animals, there’s always a risk of losing our social license to operate (more on that in some upcoming articles–I’ll add links once published).

So with that in mind, I’ve decided to embark on a mission of trying out the Horse in the City life, starting with just my small town of 4000 people only 4 km away. I can get there through back roads, avoiding the main highway (which is incredibly dangerous even by car). I’d like to begin by going to the grocery store and the post office, and maybe even the laundromat (but I’ll need better transport equipment and bigger pack bags for that).

To get started, I’m going to take Eric Rousseaux’s advice and be courteous with shop managers, checking in with the businesses to let them know I plan to come by horseback and will tie up the horses nearby. I also need to look into the materials I need to be sure Sabrina (who will be my “pack Trakehner”) can comfortably carry my stuff. And I’ll do some early tests to make sure both Solstice (whom I’ll be riding) and Sabrina are desensitized to various city-related sights and noises and smells.

If you can think of other prep ideas, please let me know!

The box stall is really no place for a horse. But that’s a relatively new idea.

After all, we’ve made great progress from the time European kings kept their prized horses tied in narrow stalls in immaculate vaulted stables with “easy-to-clean” stone floors.

During my career I’ve seen some pretty spectacular stables lined with luxurious box stalls that are certainly far nicer than a lot of Parisian studio apartments! But more and more research is confirming that no matter how clean and airy and beautiful these stalls might be, the horses remain confined. And confinement for equids is just not a good thing.

My latest article in The Horse on box stall welfare, based on the work of Lea Lansade of the University of Tours, underlines this very fact. Even with enrichment in the box, horses just aren’t really happy there.

I support this science, and I live by it. My horses stay in a wide field with access to a large shelter. Some days, they’d rather be out in the rain grazing grass than staying dry in the shelter rummaging through the full-access hay. Sometimes not. I like that they have the choice.

“Welfare is about giving a choice,” Paul McGreevy told me once during an early morning phone call to a late-afternoon New South Wales, Australia, five years ago. That sentence has stuck with me since. Welfare is about giving a choice. What choice do the horses in box stalls have? None. No wonder some of them go mad… each in his or her own unique way.

And so this brings me to my profile photo. What am I doing, standing with my lovely Solstice in front of a row of confined horses in box stalls? (I mean, phew, at least his noseband is visibly loose!) And yes, I’ll admit, my own sweet boy was in one of those stalls, too, back then. It was just what people in France did–and what most still do. Lea Lansade admits it freely as well–she always kept her horses in box stalls until she got involved in the research. The point is to evolve, not to shame and point fingers. And it’s also to set new standards and examples of what we consider beautiful and glorious.

And because of that, I’ve scheduled a new photo shoot to create a new profile photo for my website and the magazines I write for. In the new photo, I’ll be posing outdoors with my free-roaming horses near their 15th-century stone shelter.

And to be fair, I won’t delete the old photo. I’ll keep it here, in this blog post, to remind us that we’re all at different phases of understanding what’s best for horse welfare, and at some point, we all believe we’re doing the best we can.