Sharing Costs, Spreading Risks - Racehorse syndicates have been around for a long time, but it’s only in the last 20 years that sport horse syndicates have become more common. In the horse world, a syndicate is generally a group of people who pool their funds to invest in a horse together and share the horse’s annual costs. Everyone who “buys in” is a shareholder and owns a portion of the horse for a set period of time, or until the horse is resyndicated or sold.

A Burgeoning Business - In the past eight years, stand-alone equine rehabilitation and conditioning centres that help horses return to health or greater fitness have been opening their doors in British Columbia, Alberta, and Saskatchewan. Depending on the business owners’ interests, skills, and client base each operation provides a unique suite of therapy modalities such as treadmills, pools, exercisers, saltwater baths, and solariums. Additional services and treatments such as bodywork, nebulizers, and product sales are also common.

Canada’s prairie country always seems barren to me, as though something is missing and the ecosystem is incomplete. Probably because it is. For tens of thousands of years, as many as 30 million bison formed the cornerstone of a complex ecosystem, which dominated the Great Plains. In 1890, bison were perilously close to extinction, with less than 1,000 animals scattered across the continent. Today, largely due to conservation efforts by Parks Canada, bison thrive in parks and private herds, worldwide.

Regenerative medicine covers a suite of different technologies that enhance the horse’s natural healing process and help them heal faster. Equine veterinarians have been using regenerative medicine for the past decade to treat joint disease and soft tissue injuries; however, it’s new to many horse owners and only equine veterinarians specializing in sports medicine tend to offer the technologies.

The ASPCA Alfred B. Maclay Horsemanship Championship, known simply as “the Maclay,” is the most prestigious equitation class for under 18-year-olds in North America. Held every fall since 1933, the championship is considered a proving ground for future champions and many teens tailor their junior riding years specifically toward the class. The winners' list is a who’s who of the North American hunter-jumper world and includes American riders William C. Steinkraus (1941), Frank Chapot (1947), George Morris (1952), J. Michael Plumb (1957), Conrad Homfield (1967), Leslie Burr (1972), and Jessica Springsteen (2008), among others. Four Canadians have also won the coveted championship trophy — Laura Tidball (1980), Erynn Ballard (1998), Brian Walker (2001), and Sam Walker (2018) — and all four of them have subsequently represented Canada in show jumping competitions.

Finding the money for horse sport can be challenging, but with ingenuity, riders can discover funding in unusual places. Cash with minimal strings attached is available through grants, bursaries, awards, and scholarships.

Resilience: Rethinking, Restructuring, Reevaluating due to COVID-19 - Every year since 2016, University of Guelph equine faculty and students have organized the Equine Industry Symposium to bring together experts and horse enthusiasts from Canada’s equine community and discuss horse industry issues. In 2020, there was only one topic on everyone’s mind: how Canada’s equine industry would make it through the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic and what the industry would look like in its aftermath.

Adventure racing - navigating over an unmarked wilderness course where the fastest person wins — has been a recognized sport for about 30 years. But horseback adventure racing is still evolving, with international race organizers determining their own rules.

What is it and how can it help horses and riders? Riders train horses to act in ways they deem positive, whether it’s jumping a jump, walking down a trail, or performing movements in an arena. But to train horses effectively and safely, riders, trainers, and coaches must understand how they learn and react. Over the past 15 years, equine scientists have researched the learning theory of horses — how horses process, retain knowledge, and learn. Equitation science applies this evidence-based learning theory of horses to horse training, and explains horse behaviour based on horses being horses – without attributing human emotions, ways of thinking, or behaviour, to them. It’s a burgeoning field that is changing the way many riders and trainers think and act.