Cars dent, horse riders break: Analysis of police-recorded injury incidents involving ridden horses on public roads in Great Britain (2023)

More than half of incidents occurred on unclassified roads (56.2%) and in rural areas (85.1%)

avoidance of roads by equestrians could lead to a downward spiral in terms of equestrian road safety. Over 80% of road users injured in these incidents were female, 36% were aged between 36 and 55 years of age, while 25% were aged between 0 and 20 years of age, and 84% were horse riders.

Classing horses as vehicles fails to acknowledge their role as autonomous road users in their own right as well as failing to recognize the complex bond that most equestrians have with their horses; often perceiving them as valued friends, companions or family members.

In road incidents involving ridden horses, it is almost always the horse rider that is injured. The horse riders injured in these incidents are largely women and just over a quarter are young adults or children. Incidents involving ridden horses, horse riders, cyclists and motorcyclists were more likely than car occupants to be severely or fatally injured

Public Roads as Places of Interspecies Conflict: A Study of Horse-Human Interactions on UK Roads and Impacts on Equine Exercise (2021)

Roads were perceived as extremely dangerous places with potentially high conflict risk.

Results show that most equestrians (84%) use roads at least once - four times weekly, and in the previous year, 67.7% had a near-miss.

Equestrians are often considered low-priority road users by transport policymakers

The most frequently mentioned extrinsic factor which led to decisions to no longer use roads was dangerous driving

Inroads into Equestrian Safety: Rider-Reported Factors Contributing to Horse-Related Accidents and Near Misses on Australian Roads (2015)

More than half of all riders (52%) reported having experienced at least one accident or near miss in the 12 months prior to the survey, mostly attributed to speed in Australia

Insufficient action is being taken to improve the safety of around a quarter of a million horse people in Australia in general, let alone their safety whilst sharing public roads

When riders and horses interact on public roads shared with other road users, their vulnerability to injury or death is magnified

The sudden or close passing of a vehicle may trigger a horse’s dangerous flight response

The 2020 Five Domains Model: Including Human–Animal Interactions in Assessments of Animal Welfare

Humans feature as influential in animals’ external circumstances, and their interactive behaviour towards animals has the potential to elicit welfare-enhancing positive affects or welfare-compromising negative affects. The Five Domains Model as reconfigured here now provides an explicit means to effectively and systematically evaluate the animal welfare implications of a wide range of human–animal interactions.

Equestrian Road Safety in the United Kingdom: Factors Associated with Collisions and Horse Fatalities (2020)

Over 60% of UK horse riders report having experienced a road-related near-miss or accident. A fatal injury to a horse was almost 12 times as likely to result in severe to fatal rider/handler injury. Drivers passed the horse too closely in 84.2% of incidents while road rage and speeding were reported in 40.3%

The 2019 National Equestrian Survey estimated that there are 27 million people in Great Britain (GB) with an interest in the equestrian industry with the scale of annual spending in the equestrian sector totalling £4.7 billion

access to safe off-road riding routes was the single main factor preventing people from riding more regularly. The Department for Transport (DfT) police-reported road accident database shows that in 2019, out of 124 people involved in road accidents including ridden horses, 55.6% (n = 69) were injured and of those injured, 94.2% (n = 65/69) were horse riders