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.