Evidence-based actions with Gifted Equines

I have been involved with horses since I was 13 and in the equine sector for a very long time. I’ve seen countless perspectives and ways of managing and caring for horses. There are so many people out there who really are experts in their equines and deal with them in amazing ways.

It would be a huge disservice to those people if I suggested that they didn’t act based on evidence. From subtle clues to intuited gut feelings, individuals draw from a near-endless wellspring of knowledge and experience when making decisions about their animals. There is something truly unique about the human-horse bond and the level of understanding between equines and people.

However, there is a problem: the knowledge and experience of those who work with animals aren't always easily accessible. They aren’t always held in factual records that can be viewed, reviewed, analysed, and extrapolated. Oftentimes, they aren’t even easy to explain in numbers or letters. But, for the advancement of the sector and the improvement of equine welfare generally, evidence is absolutely essential.

Data on everything, from a horse's general behaviour to its reaction to people, is evidence. Data on weight, diet, disease, recovery, and a hundred other areas can be analysed and reported on. It can be built up over years to facilitate deep studies and uncover surprising patterns. There is a temptation to move away from the left-brain obsession of the modern world when dealing with animals, and there is certainly value in the spiritual and almost intangible connections.

However, we must also accept that data is invaluable to understanding animals and vital in improving our approach to caring for them. The value of data in research is clear. It is also clear that data is valuable in developing drugs and treatments, understanding behaviours, changes in health, weight loss/gain, injury, illness, disease, recovery, body language, and countless other things.

Gifted Equines facilitates streamlined data capture and access to ensure that recording data isn’t an added chore and that viewing data is simple and helpful. Data moves through workflows with intelligent automation, notifying and prompting people without manual input. Movement data linking directly to Google Maps and What3Words promotes traceability, food chain control, and biosecurity. Graphs and widgets allow data to be visualised and explored, promoting decisions based on evidence at scale.

Universities and Veterinary hospitals could tap into the data from welfare organisations to inform their research and studies, and this shared pool of knowledge could help make real advances in the animal welfare space.

Beyond individual organisations and farms, an accessible cloud solution has huge potential for the sector. Housing accurate, up-to-date, and useful data and linking to other systems is the foundation of digital identity, traceability, control of the food chain, and biosecurity.