A survey of welfare problems associated with transporting horses by road in Germany (2022–2024)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Equine road transport is stressful and associated with an increased risk of behavioral problems, injuries, respiratory and gastrointestinal diseases. This cross-sectional survey-based study aimed to describe transport-related practices and the perception of behavioral and health issues in Germany. The survey targeted horse owners (amateurs and professionals) and obtained demographic details, the participant's experience, frequency and duration of transportation, and behavioral and health problems related to equine transportation. Associations among behavioral and health problems and transport parameters were examined with logistic regression analysis. In total, 432 horse owners participated, but only 59.7% (258 respondents) completed the questionnaire. Most journeys (72.5%) were < 2 hours in duration and 45.8% fed hay in transit. One-third of respondents observed behavioral and 42.6% reported health problems. Diarrhea was most common (33.9%), followed by injuries (19.3%), muscle disorders (4%), respiratory problems, and colic (each 2.4%). Professionals were less likely to observe diarrhea in transported horses than amateurs (OR 1.04). In single transportation, horses were significantly more likely to show behavioral problems than when transported together (OR 0.53, CI 0.35-0.76, P = 0.001). In conclusion, most of the journeys in Germany were short (<2 hours). A high rate of behavioral problems was reported, whereas health issues were considerably less frequently observed. This may be associated with management practices, implementation of safety equipment, shorter travel distances, and favorable climatic conditions in comparison to other studies. • Diarrhea was the most common health problem reported during road transport in Germany. • Horses transported by professionals had a significantly lower risk to develop diarrhea or behavioral problems than those transported by amateurs. • Horses transported alone were significantly more likely to show behavioral problems than when transported together. • This study found a very low occurrence of owner-reported occurrence of respiratory problems.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".