Follow the Money: What the Horse World Pays to Learn
I went looking for proof that a more varied diet builds a more resilient horse. What I found instead was a map of who pays for equine science — and what those dollars are really asking.
I started with a question: if I deliberately built a diet around diversity — varied forages, a wider range of plants and fibers, the kind of mixed browsing a horse would do if left to its own devices — would I be able to create a resilient biome, one that would be less likely to be thrown by a sudden change in feed?
The logic is simple. For a gut to process a food, it has to have the bacteria on hand that can break that food down. So the theory runs like this: feed a varied diet and I’m feeding a diverse set of bacteria — and that range of microbes is the thing standing ready to process whatever range of inputs I put in front of my horse. Keep the bench deep, and a new feed stops being a shock to the system. It’s just one more thing the gut was already equipped to handle.
Because if the answer were yes, then the rule every one of us was raised on — introduce any new feed slowly, over ten to fourteen days, or risk colic — would start to look less like a fixed law of equine biology and more like a workaround for a fragile gut we built ourselves. That was the idea. I wanted to know if it had merit. So I went looking for the peer-reviewed research.
What I found was not a clean yes or a clean no. What I found was a hole.
The specific test — does feeding diversity build a biome resilient enough to absorb a change — has barely been run in horses. What exists sits just to the side of it, pointing the right direction without ever closing the loop. Horses given a choice of several forages instead of one forage more naturally and clearly prefer the variety. And as a broad principle, lower microbial diversity tends to mean lower gut stability. The mechanism is sound ecology — diversity in, diversity maintained, resilience as a result. But the horse study that would carry it from sound theory to demonstrated fact isn’t there. No one has run it.
And here is the part that turned a feeding question into a different kind of question entirely. The diet research that has been funded — the well-cited, repeated, peer-reviewed work — is almost all pointed the other direction. It is about managing the fallout of how we already feed. We know, from large prospective studies, that a change in batch of hay or type of grain raises the risk of colic, and that feeding large grain meals does measurable things to the gut. That’s good science. But look at what it’s for: it tells us how to safely operate the delicate system we designed. It does not ask whether we could build a sturdier one.
So I stopped asking about diet and started asking about money. Who funds equine science? What are they trying to prove? And who does it actually serve?
Who pays, and what they ask
The first name you hit, when you go looking for who pays for horse research, is the Grayson-Jockey Club Research Foundation — the best known, and the longest at it. It committed about $2.7 million in 2025, part of more than $44 million across 450-plus projects since 1940. It was built by Thoroughbred horsemen, its career-development award is named for a stallion, and while its findings genuinely benefit all breeds, the orientation shows in the portfolio: year after year, the largest categories of work are infectious disease and the injuries that end racing careers.
The Morris Animal Foundation is the other American pillar — more than $26 million across 670-plus equine studies since 1959 — and its record is built on vaccines, genetic screening tests, and disease.
In the UK the pattern isn’t subtle, it’s structural. The Horserace Betting Levy Board funds equine veterinary research from a statutory levy on horse-race betting — on the order of two to three million pounds a year, explicitly for the benefit of the Thoroughbred — and its stated priorities are disease control and the minimising of fatal and non-fatal injury in training and racing.
Breed associations follow suit. A recent American Quarter Horse Foundation round put $417,673 into projects on drug-resistant foal infections, osteoarthritis drugs, and wearable sensors — funding, in its own words, the “health, welfare and utility” of the horse.
Even the public money asks a production question. At the USDA’s research arm, horses are funded as livestock, inside programs for animal health and animal reproduction, where the named outcomes are vaccines, diagnostics, and reproductive efficiency.
And the flagship academic institute, the Gluck Equine Research Center at the University of Kentucky, is by its own description the only US center where nearly all faculty research equine health and diseases full-time — the birthplace of six of the ten major equine vaccines — sustained in large part by Thoroughbred breeding money whose custodians describe their mission as responding to existential threats to the breeding industry.
Then there’s the money that dwarfs all of the above: the pharmaceutical industry. The global animal-health market was already a $23 billion market when Zoetis — the world’s largest animal-health company, with 300-plus product lines — spun out of Pfizer. Boehringer Ingelheim runs on the order of $4.5 billion in annual animal-health research and development. And what is that money chasing, on the equine side? Their own catalog answers it: vaccines, de-wormers, joint therapy, and solutions for ulcers and pain. The shots. The joint injections. The ulcer meds. The painkillers.
The further I went, the more the pools looked alike. I kept expecting to find at least one big, disinterested source — money given to understand the horse for the horse’s own sake. Among the money that actually moves the field, I didn’t. Every major pool runs the same arithmetic: money in the front, a return out the back, the horse somewhere in the middle. Racing’s return is the race. Pharma’s is the cure. The feed company’s is the bag. The government’s is production. And the registry’s is the most literal of all — the foal itself, bred and registered and sold, then sold again into breeding and showing and racing, each its own market. There, the horse isn’t even the means to the product. The horse is the product. Almost none of it is spent without expecting the horse to earn it back.
What it buys the horse
The truth is, the research does help horses. Vaccines stop outbreaks that would kill them. Better diagnostics and surgical techniques and safer footing mean fewer catastrophic breakdowns. Genetic screens let us retire heritable disease out of the population. The merit is real and the benefit to horses is real, and nothing I’m turning over here takes that away.
But I keep coming back to the shape of it. Almost without exception, the money buys ways for the horse to tolerate us — to withstand being hauled and stabled in large groups, to keep running, to keep breeding, to keep performing on our schedule. Strip it all the way down and that is what we have funded, over and over: how to make a horse tolerate the things we do to it and the way we keep it. What we have rarely paid to ask is the other question entirely — whether the things we do, and the way we keep them, are part of what wears them down in the first place.
And I don’t think that’s a conspiracy, or even a failing. I think it’s history. For almost all of the time horses and humans have shared, a horse was livestock — a work tool, an asset, a way to get somewhere. The idea that we’d study a horse’s diet, or its gut, or its behavior for the horse’s own sake rather than for its output is genuinely recent. Species-appropriate care, gentler training, welfare treated as its own end — these are young conversations, and the money hasn’t caught up to them. Which is exactly why so much of what we know about them is still observational, or anecdotal, or built on a handful of small studies. The questions aren’t settled because no one has funded them long enough to settle.
What’s starting to change
Here is the budding shift, and the reason I think this is hopeful rather than bleak. That disinterested money — the kind given purely to understand the horse — does exist. It’s just small, and new. Welfare charities like World Horse Welfare and The Horse Trust fund research into equine quality of life and behavior for no reason other than the horse’s own good. The one dedicated equine-behavior fund I could find at a major foundation exists because a single donor created it, capped at $20,000 a project, after concluding such funding had been “minimal.” Twenty thousand dollars, beside billions. But it’s there. And around it, in just the last few years, a genuine body of peer-reviewed work has begun to build — led out of the UK, though international in reach — asking a different question than any of the big funders ever have. Not how to make the horse endure us. How the horse actually lives, what it feels, and what it is to us.
Some of it is aimed squarely at the bond. Researchers recently adapted the classic “strange situation” attachment test for horses and found that horses approach their own rider faster than a stranger and stay closer to them — behavioral evidence of a specific attachment, and an argument that we should be studying the socio-emotional side of the relationship at all (Kovács et al., 2026). Another team built the first validated scale to measure the human-horse bond, from more than 3,600 owners, and found it has six dimensions — companionship, personal wellbeing, dependence, status, growth, and, tellingly, sacrifice: the financial and personal investment owners pour in (Corrigan et al., 2025). Sacrifice didn’t show up as the opposite of love. It showed up as one of its measures. The money we spend on a horse and the bond we have with it are, it turns out, the same gesture.
Dog people have known this for a while, and the science followed them there. Because a dog’s whole value is the relationship, the funding flowed toward how dogs think, how they age well, how the bond works — an entire field of canine cognition and healthy-aging research, some of it federally funded, built around the life of the animal rather than its output. The horse world is arriving at that same door now. For more and more of us, the horse stopped being a tool a long time ago. The science is finally catching up to what we already felt.
We don’t have to burn it down to do better
None of this makes anyone a villain, and I want to be careful here. You can love a horse and still need it to earn its keep — horses are expensive, and there is no shame in that. The groom at the track who says “but we love our horses” is telling the truth. Loving a horse and seeing room to do better by it were never opposites; they live in the same person, easily. I know, because they live in me.
So here’s what I can’t stop thinking about. We have spent decades, and fortunes, funding ways to help horses tolerate how we keep them — chasing longevity, soundness, fewer ulcers, steadier minds, by managing the consequences. What if we spent even a fraction of that following the science that’s beginning to point upstream — toward better ways to feed them, house them, handle them, and start them? Not a teardown. Not throwing out everything we know. Small, evidence-based changes to how we already do things could move that bar — the same bar we’ve been straining to move from the wrong end — faster than another decade of buying the durability back one injection at a time.
A great deal of “the way we’ve always done things” is good. It’s hard-won and true and worth keeping. Modernizing it doesn’t mean discarding it; it means holding it up to the light of the research and the behavior of the horses themselves, and keeping what holds. That is the entire reason Improve Equine exists — not to tear down the way we’ve always done things, but to sort the wisdom from the habit, grounded in science and in what our horses are plainly trying to tell us. Keep the baby, just change the water. And maybe, if enough of us start asking the question with our attention and our dollars, the science will finally come meet us where the horses already are.
References
- Goodwin, D., Davidson, H.P.B., & Harris, P. (2002). Foraging enrichment for stabled horses: effects on behaviour and selection. Equine Veterinary Journal, 34(7), 686–691.
- Garber, A., Hastie, P., & Murray, J-A. (2020). Factors Influencing Equine Gut Microbiota: Current Knowledge. Journal of Equine Veterinary Science, 88, 102943.
- Tinker, M.K., White, N.A., Lessard, P., Thatcher, C.D., Pelzer, K.D., Davis, B., & Carmel, D.K. (1997). Prospective study of equine colic risk factors. Equine Veterinary Journal, 29(6), 454–458.
- Hudson, J.M., Cohen, N.D., Gibbs, P.G., & Thompson, J.A. (2001). Feeding practices associated with colic in horses. Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association, 219(10), 1419–1425.
- Lopes, M.A.F., White, N.A., Crisman, M.V., & Ward, D.L. (2004). Effects of feeding large amounts of grain on colonic contents and feces in horses. American Journal of Veterinary Research, 65(5), 687–694.
- Kovács, A.B., Topál, J., & Gergely, A. (2026). Horses prefer their rider: A strange situation test adaptation shows behavioural evidence for partner-specific bonding. Journal of Equine Veterinary Science, 161, 105853.
- Corrigan, R.H., Pierard, M., Davies, E., Marlin, D., Evans, S., & Williams, J.M. (2025). Development of the Human-Equine Attachment Scale. Equine Veterinary Journal (advance online publication).