Horse welfare reforms

She's received the prestigious Audience Award at the Norwegian Film Festival twice, for Pluti: The Police Car on the Chase in 2013, and the World War II ethic, epic, excuse me, Narvik from 2022.

For the past six years, she has run Norway's largest podcast about horses, and in 2023, Live received the honorary award at the Animal Gala, Dyregalla, for her work to improve horse welfare.

She has also written two best-selling novels about horses, and that's what we're here in part to talk about today.

So I wanna welcome you, Live, and I think that what would be the best approach at the moment...

But the-

So w- will you tell us?

The thing is, when it comes to horse welfare, uh, Scandinavia is quite progressive, I would say.

Um, and they started to put up cameras in the warm-up arena to kind of make it all transparent and to kind of tell people that these horses are really having the best time of their life.

If it's one or two, it's not a big deal, but it's really hard having bigger groups that leave in, 'cause I could have, you know, maybe found a couple of smaller groups that are gonna rebraid so that the workload is about the same each night instead of such a drastic drop in numbers, if that makes any sense.

As, as we talk more about horse welfare and you say don't leave them in longer than, than you need to, um, I always, like, feel, sometimes I feel like it's like, almost like a work of art that's, like, being destroyed very quickly-

[laughs]

... because I, you know, like, my horse gets to the horse show, he gets braided.

I swear, if I wasn't in tears already, that pretty much does it for me.

[laughs] Like, can you, can you just at least wait until I'm out of the barn and I don't see you taking those braids out, please?

But, you know, we, we have a lot of conversations going around about, about cost and horse welfare and, you know, we're having more conversations about mane pulling, if that's, like, even ethical.

And, you know, we all know that you basically can't have a beautiful braided mane without pulling the mane.

Yeah, I think this is a great question to ask.

Does the law adequately reflect the reality of horse welfare today? Does it adequately encompass what we use horses for now and how they're seen now and what kind of goes along with it? And I think it's important for us to understand the legal distinctions.

between these things and why so many people are really upset and also understanding how the law has only so much they can do in this situation yeah um the prosecutors that anybody there is no level that they can they can't take it to a felony because of the statute of limitation essentially and so it's kind of interesting when you place it that way like At what point are the laws outdated? At what point are they also feeding into this? Because with a misdemeanor, mostly it's fines.

I don't believe you can get any substantial jail time.