100 A survey of general road transportation of horses in the United States

Abstract

An online survey was conducted to understand the most common reasons for travel and the types of journeys horses take when being transported by road in the United States. Qualtrics was used to create a survey, with a subset of 20-questions that asked about the demographics of the survey taker and general questions about road transportation. To participate in the survey, respondents had to be at least 18 years old and own, lease, or be in the full care of one or more horses or ponies that resided in the U.S and were transported by road in 2021. The survey was advertised on Facebook and through various equine media publications where responses were collected from 1294 participants. While there was at lease one response from every state in the continental US, the majority of responses were from the Southeast (41.6%). The most common survey taker was a female (93.9%), adult amateur (81.2%), horse owner (64.4%), who owns 1 to 3 horses (55.6%), and transports their own horse (79.4%). Overall, the most common reasons for travel were trail or leisure riding (34.2%) followed by showing and competition (25.3%); however, this varied by discipline with dressage (42.6%) and eventing (46.2%) riders most common reasons for travel being for lessons and schooling. The most common trip length was less than one hour (46.8%) with only 12.4% of triplengths being 4 h or more in length. The roads traveled most often were highways (60.7%) that were mostly straight with some curves (41.7%) and flat with some hills (46.9%). As the length of trip increased, the frequency in which a horse was transported decreased and the amount of time between trips increased. The length of the most common trip also varied by reason for transportation with the most common length to travel for showing or competition being one to 3 h (51%); traveling for lessons was typically less than an hour (71.2%) and transporting for trail or leisure riding usually took less than 3 h (92.1%) when comparing to other trip lengths. These results provide insight into the main reasons why horses are being transported by road in the US and the types of journeys they are transported most frequently. It also highlights differences in reasons for transportation and journey lengths between horse owners. Although previous equine road transportation research has focused mainly on long-distance trips, these findings support the need for further research on how short-distance road transportation might impact horse health in the US