Guides.
Long-form notes on keeping and knowing horses, sourced from the governing bodies rather than from received wisdom.
Long-form guides on keeping and knowing horses, written from the governing bodies’ own documents rather than from received wisdom. Where the published advice contradicts itself we say so rather than picking whichever number reads best. If the sources disagree, you’ll see that they disagree.
They sit alongside the short answers, which handle single questions in a couple of hundred words, and the breed pages, which cover a particular horse. Start wherever you are.
Care and keeping
The horse rug guide: when to rug, what the fill weights mean, and why the published charts disagree with each other by a whole category.
Horse years in human years: the popular converters apply a flat multiple of three, which breaks down by age five, and the harder half of the question is whether the age you were given is real.
Racing
Point-to-point and the jumps season: the only British racing tied to hunting, what a Hunter Certificate is, and how it feeds National Hunt.
National Hunt racing: what the horses jump. The hurdle height everyone quotes is the panel, not the obstacle, and the BHA’s own specification puts the top bar five inches lower.
After racing: what the first Thoroughbred Census found: 33,600 former racehorses, and most of them are not competing.
Also worth reading
Two of the most-asked questions are long enough to be guides in their own right: what a horse really costs to keep, where the published figures range from £5,350 (BHS) to £14,820 (MoneySuperMarket) a year for reasons nobody explains, and what makes a Thoroughbred, which turns out to be a matter of a rulebook rather than a look.
More guides are being added as each subject earns a page of its own. Who writes them, and the standard they are held to, is on the about page.
Written by Craig Fearn, Stable & Hoof. Last updated .