I attended the international conference on horse welfare at Flyinge on 13-14 September 2024 and I am glad they organized it. In addition to taking part in fantastic lectures and having interesting conversations with knowledgeable people, I got some ”flashbacks” from early sustainability and environmental conferences. A little unclear thread and a certain feeling of uncertainty in the air sometimes. It is a difficult topic they are adressing and it is not as well defined!

The the years I have been in professional life and have worked to create change in, above all, companies’ sustainability work, there is one important lesson that I think is relevant in order to speed up the transition, that is that we need to be really clear what the goal is.

What do I mean by that?

1. We need to be clear about what different words and actually mean so that we are talking about the same thing. We don’t have time to unintentionally misunderstand each other. It also think this was confirmed at the conference by, among others, Professor Kendra Coulter. I wrote a blog about this in January.

2. We need to be extremely clear about what the goal is, where are we going? When we are clear, we can both discuss whether we agree with the goal, we can collaborate to create solutions and we can describe what we have done and how much we have left. What can then be a common goal? A starting point from the conference could be Lisa Ashton’s slide combining the five domains and ISES training principles. Lisa has been with ISES since its inception 20 years ago. This image has a scientific basis and is perhaps something that can be used?

3. The benefit of having a clear goal description to work towards is also that you can plan from success, use backcasting. That is, to stand in the future and look back to today and plan how we can reach our goal from the current situation we have. It is also easier to discuss solutions and to be transparent in showing where the organization is today and what improvement plans exist. According to my experience, it is easier to both constructively disagree about solutions and the pace and to cooperate.

If I think back to HWS, Horse Welfare Summit, the first version and as I said, applaud for a well-executed event and that it was executed!

I think the purpose of the different agenda items sometimes could have been clearer if, they had been linked to a goal description.

1. What does this lecture connect to?

2. What do we want this trainer to illustrate?

During the days, I also received some comments about what visitors saw at Flyinge regarding horse welfare. Are there challenges with the paddocks? Someone saw a horse with leg wraps (banned in the Netherlands) and a horse they thought had too too tight noseband?.

Flyinge of course has a lot of policies and regulations in place for example for horsekeeping.

It is the same at a sustainability event that the venue will be scrutenised on sustainability status, what energy do they use? is the food sustainable? And everyone presenting, especially if they make money out of what they present is also scrutinised. Is the event trying to give credit to all the work they do or only a specific exemple? For example their work on renewable electricity?

I think the work with horse welfare would benefit from establishing an even more clear description of the journey we’re now on, for example using backcasting as a method. It will be interesting to see if we can find something like this to unite us.

Because we are all on a journey, just like with sustainability, we start in different places and have slightly different challenges, but we must relentlessly both ensure that we get ecologically and socially sustainable operations and good horse welfare with all that entails.