Long life: Meeting Pavarotti’s horse

Always on the lookout for new heart-wrenching tales of animal suffering, the press has seized upon the news that a great many British horse-riders are too fat for their mounts. In the quaint words of the Sunday Telegraph, this puts horses ‘at risk of several welfare conditions’, including back pain, lameness and general bad temper.  Research published in the Journal of Veterinary Behaviour had found that a third of all recreational riders weighed more than what their horses could comfortably carry. Ideally a horse should be about ten times heavier than its rider, experts said, but the growing obesity of the population meant that this often wasn’t so.

I can be as obese as I like because I don’t ride. I’ve been frightened of horses ever since, as a young child, I was put on a horse by my elder sisters who then struck it hard on its bottom to make it gallop. But I live in a very horsey county, Northamptonshire, where it is rare to go out anywhere in the car without passing young riders primly exercising their mounts. They annoy me because they look so pleased with themselves. They don’t pay any road tax, but this doesn’t stop them feeling that the road somehow belongs to them and that motorists are only there on sufferance. However, I have never seen any horse struggling under its human burden. It’s not that Northamptonshire lacks overweight people, quite the contrary; but its riders seem on the whole to be a trim and healthy lot.

I am suspicious of this scare because it is just the kind of thing that you would expect our health enforcers to come up with. If we don’t like being told how to live our lives and are unmoved by statistics showing how much money our bad habits are costing the National Health Service, they try to shame us into changing our ways by telling us that we are also harming others.