Webinar – Dr Heather Cameron-Whytock – Equine Fatalities in Eventing

Dr Heather Cameron-Whytock recently joined the Animalweb Team to tell us about her recently published study – Equine Fatalities In Eventing.

This webinar from Dr Heather Cameron-Whytock delves into her recently published research on equine fatalities in eventing, highlighting the surprising findings that horse falls are not the predominant risk factor for horse fatalities. The discussion covers the methodology used in the research, the importance of data validation, and the implications for future studies. It emphasises the need for collaboration among researchers and governing bodies to improve equestrian safety and welfare. The conversation also touches on the role of technology in advancing research and the importance of accurate reporting in the equestrian community.

Key points:

• Understanding the context of equine fatalities is vital for improving safety.
• Horse falls are not the highest risk to horses in eventing.
• Sudden deaths account for a significant percentage of equine fatalities.
• Research should focus on equine fatalities, not just falls.
• Collaboration among researchers is crucial for accurate data.
• Governing bodies need to improve data collection methods.
• Accurate reporting of equine fatalities is essential for safety.

To read the published paper, please follow the link. Equine Fatalities in Eventing.

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Transcription
Here is a transcription of the webinar. (Please note this is an automated transcription, so we apologise for any errors.)

Hello and welcome to another Ask Animal Web webinar. Today we’ve asked our friend Heather Cameron-Whitlock to come back and talk to us about her recent study that has just been published. You may remember, Heather, from some of the other work that we’ve got on the site. Please go back and look at it. All around safety and horses.

and riders across country. But I will let Heather talk to us about her new research and then I might come back with some questions if that’s okay, Heather. But please, if you want to find out more about Heather, she’s on the website, look under the expert section, you’ll find her in there and links to all the other work that she’s done and shared with us on here. But it’s important work that she’s doing about safety for horses and for riders, of course.

So do have a look at that, but I’ll pass over to you, Heather, and you can tell us about this recent research that’s been published. Thanks, Helen. Yeah, so we just published a paper in Equine Veterinary Journal called Equine Fatalities in Equestrian Eventing. So that’s what I’m going to talk about today. So it’s previously been believed that the highest risk of injury to the horse and rider during eventing is a horse fall during the cross-country phase and

When I say it was previously believed, I include myself and the people that I work with because as you might be aware, a lot of the focus in risk management in research that we’ve published has been looking at horse falls and reducing them to obviously improve welfare and safety in both the horse and the rider. But actually, upon looking into this more closely over the years of work that we’ve done, we realized that actually there’s not a lot of data on

horse injuries and horse fatalities specifically, it’s very clear that horse falls are the highest risk of injury and fatality to the rider, that is a fact. But it’s not so clear that they are in fact the highest risk to horses, so that’s what sparked off this study. So just to highlight some of the previous work that we’ve done, if anyone’s not aware, so we published a really large study on British eventing data, was 11 years of data,

looking at risk factors for horse falls. We’ve also published similar papers with the FEI, so that was led by my colleague Ewan and also alongside Tim Parkin. So we’ve published, as you can see, we’ve published a series of work around horse falls and eventing. So we have worked at, as Helen said, making eventing safer. And then this is the publication I’m talking about today on the left, looking into equine fatalities in eventing.

So, as I said, equine fatalities in venting are not well understood. There’s actually no official data available for research and previous research has focused on horse falls which are the highest risk to the rider. So our aim was to investigate equine fatalities in venting, focusing on their context, pathology and location. So where in the competition did they happen?

And our method was to harvest data from a combination of media reports and eventing federation databases. So the FEI publish a safety report every year. It’s usually around the start of the year for the previous season. And previously, historically in that report, it has not included any information about equine fatality and injury. However, recently, I think it was either in this year or the one last year for the first time they included equine.

fatality numbers, but it’s quite a simplistic table. just says how many horses died each year. So there’s no information on like what the circumstances were on the fatalities or what competitions they were at, what level, things like that. It’s just a sort of overall number. yeah, so the data available wasn’t in that detail. So what we did was we used media reports of equine fatalities to

identified that an equine fatality had happened and then what we would do is confirm that we’d validate that case by looking on a federation database. So for example, if we found a media report of a horse fatality at an event and it said the horse was competing at novice level with this rider and they had a fall at fence 10 and a fatality.

We would go to the Federation database, the relevant Federation database, because this is a global study, so we used all fatalities from around the world. So for example, if it was a US horse, we’d go to the US Federation database. And what we do is confirm that that horse and rider were riding in that competition on that day and that whatever is recorded on the competition database corroborated that finding. So the competition databases will not say fatality, but they will say, withdraw, eliminated XC or horse fall XC.

So that was a way for us just in the most simplistic form to validate that the media report wasn’t completely spurious or completely made up. And just a little bit about how this came about as well. I talked before about our previous research and our thoughts, but we also reached out to one of our co-authors on this paper. We reached out to Denzel O’Brien, who published a paper called Look Before You Leap.

which was a description of fatalities that had happened at a venting. And, you know, obviously that paper was quite known to us and we cited it quite a lot previously. And we reached out to Denzel and said we wanted to do a study on something like this. And she had actually been recording equine fatalities in her own database for a long time. I can’t remember how long it was, but it was a long period of time, maybe 10 years or something. So, and Ewan and I had also started recording equine fatalities.

on our own little database, but we hadn’t been doing half as long as Denzel had. So Denzel sent us her data and we sort of combined the two and then we went to work going through and trying to validate all those reports.

So in our study, there was 110 equine fatalities recorded. I can’t remember the exact number, I haven’t got it in front of me, but through the validation process, I think we removed about 100 records. So we were very strict on if we couldn’t corroborate the media report, we wouldn’t include it. So what I will say is a lot of the time we couldn’t corroborate it because we couldn’t access the federation database or some federation databases we noticed that once a horse had…

had a fatal accident, they removed them from the database. So what I will say is we could have included a lot more fatalities, but we were trying to be really strict on being able to validate them. And the other thing to bear in mind is that, you know, we use media reports. Anyone who’s involved in inquest journalism will know that they’re much more likely to report in the media an equine fatality that happens at the highest level of the sport. So at the big famous five stars and four stars.

We don’t often hear about fatalities happening at the lower levels. And I know that they do. have lots of friends who compete and contacts in the industry. And I know of fatalities happening in the last couple of years that weren’t available to us from a media report. So that’s just important to bear in mind when we’re talking about this study. It’s not a complete picture. It’s a sample. So we had 110 equine fatalities between 1998 and 2023.

We had a median age of 12 years and 77 % of the fatalities were international events, 22 % were national events. And that firms up what I was just saying. At the international competitions, you’re much more likely to have that equine fatality reported in the media because there’s public interest at the highest levels of the sport. So that’s why.

That’s one reason why there’s so many, but also we also know from research that the highest levels of competition and international competition, so one star, two star and above, is the most dangerous. So we know that from a horse fall work. For example, you’re much more likely to have a horse fall or to have faults at the highest levels of competition. So it also makes sense that you’re more likely to have equine fatalities at the highest level. But I don’t think those percentages will be accurate of the true picture of if we had all fatalities.

So what did we find? We found that 36 % of the fatalities were due to MSK injuries, 36 % were due to sudden death, and then 27 % we didn’t know what the pathology was because it wasn’t reported in the press. So we knew those were fatality but they didn’t describe what was wrong with the horse.

We also found in regards to the context and location that 80 % of fatalities occurred on the cross-country courses. Again, this isn’t a surprise. We know that that phase is the most serious. There were a couple, a number of fatalities in there that happened immediately after cross-country as well. And then 62 % of fatalities were not associated with a horse fall at a fence. I think that’s a really important finding.

because as I started with the presentation, we previously believed horse falls at fences on the cross-country course were the greatest risk of injury and fatality to both horse and rider. And this indicates that that is perhaps not the case for horses. And although horse falls are obviously not good for horses and they can incur injury, it appears it’s not the predominant risk factor for injury and fatality.

And if we look at the pathology percentage, that also tells us that. So 36 % of the pathology of the fatalities were due to sudden death. And that tends to be when the horse just collapses between a fence, for example, or immediately after cross country. So again, that tells us that there’s an important finding that we weren’t aware of before. And that is that sudden death is an issue in eventing.

It’s not necessarily more or less of an issue in eventing than any other sport that horses compete in, but it’s under-researched and under-described. So in horse racing, for example, there’s been a lot of work, particularly actually by Ewan Bennett and Professor Tim Parkin, who collaborated with me on this study. You know, in the US, we’ve got studies that talk about sudden death, report the incidents and factors associated with them. So…

It’s definitely more researched than other horse sports and I think this is the first time it’s been highlighted as a predominant factor in eventing.

So what are our key takeaways from this is that horse fatalities in eventing are not only related to horse falls at fences, but also due to MSK injuries and sudden death. The MSK injuries would typically result in euthanasia. So that’s how that factor works as a factor of fatality. Cross-country remains the highest risk phase for horse fatalities.

And research now needs to focus on investigating sudden death and MSK injuries in horses during eventing, particularly in the lead up to a fatality. What was I going to say? That, yeah, we didn’t perform any like inferential analysis or statistical analysis on this data because we didn’t feel it was appropriate. A, because of the sample size, but B, because of the origin of the data. And although we validated it the best that we could, we just didn’t.

think we’d get anything of value from inferential analysis. So that’s why what we’ve done instead is describe the data that we can see in the proportions of everything. And even just that has shown up novel findings that weren’t reported previously. And just to acknowledge my co-authors, as I mentioned a few times, Dr. Ewan Bennett from Glasgow, Professor Tim Parkin from Bristol.

Victoria Lewis from Hartbury. Victoria is an FEI steward, I believe, and past professional rider. And she’s a researcher as well. And so her expertise was a great addition. And Denzel O’Brien, who I mentioned, who previously published some comparable research and also, I believe, was the CEO of Equestria in Australia for a number of years. yeah, we had a bit of a dream team on this project.

That’s brilliant, Heber. That’s some very interesting information in there, isn’t it? Really? I’ve now got a few questions about it. Just to go back a little bit, Denzel’s study sounds like it was quite important. What was she looking into exactly?

Denzel’s study, she described, I think it was all the rider fatalities, so it was a paper similar to this, but it had a table and it had, it was very similar to this but presented in a different way, so she presented each individual rider fatality, like their name, the location, what happened in a big table, and then discussed that. And that’s basically what we did with the horses, so we wanted to sort of repeat Denzel’s study but doing it on horses.

But we just didn’t include descriptions of individuals. Instead, we presented in aggregate form. But I would imagine there was probably, I’d like to think, there was less human fatalities than there have been horses. It’s difficult to say, actually. I mean, you would presume that there’s been, I think,

Yeah, think globally actually, that’s a point. think there has been less, I don’t think there’s been 108 rider fatalities in the last 25 years. I imagine, yeah, I think the proportion of forced fatalities would be quite a lot higher. It’s quite difficult to assess that because we don’t have the full data set. So obviously in an ideal situation, we’d have what we call denominator data. So we’d have how many people…

started in the US, so how many people did a cross-country course in the US and then what proportion of those horses died and that would tell us a lot more. But getting that information is hard. I should have maybe mentioned this actually. One of the reasons that getting data for example from governing bodies is that they actually have challenges in recording accurate crime fatality data and there’s a couple of reasons for that and sometimes it’s because the fatality doesn’t happen.

immediately on the course or at the competition. So for example an MSK injury rider might travel the horse or take the horse elsewhere to be seen by their own vet. So it’s not the easiest thing for the governing bodies to record. Any fatalities that happen on their site they will record but other than that it can be a challenge. Yeah well that funny enough that was one of my questions or points of discussion really I found.

I it interesting that the governing bodies don’t have all of this information. It’s incredible to think that it takes dedicated researchers working collaboratively, which is lovely. Obviously you reached out to Denzel when she collaborated and you were able to do that. But it’s interesting that even in today’s sport, the governing bodies aren’t necessarily able to record all of this information themselves.

I think that they are recording it. So for example, all the fatalities that happen on cross-country courses, I think they are recording that. you know, for example, I believe that FEI will have a lot more detailed information behind the scenes. It’s just not in their public report. It’s just that we couldn’t access data for the purposes of research at this time. So, but we wanted to do the study so much that we thought we’ll do it this way. And hopefully this will then lead to further commissioned work, perhaps in collaboration with the governing bodies.

Yeah, no, I know. think you would agree. Today, the FEI have actually been pretty good at allowing you guys access to these sorts of things. It’s always just proving it’s worth it. Yeah. And it’s a complex process as well, like data, know, GDPR and all those legalities and the things like that and the process of proposing research. So it takes time. Absolutely. And I think there’s so much pressure that we don’t always

wrongly or rightly, but always a lot of pressure on these things, particularly when these horses are worth a lot of money and have different owners who, you know, it’s not just always the horse, is it? There’s a lot of people around it that have to, insurance companies or whatever. What I was going to say is, is there anywhere people can report this? So if you are at a lower level when, you know, is there places where people can report this sort of information so it can be recorded?

Yes, as far as I’m aware, there’s not a public way that you can report that. Maybe someone should set that up. But yeah, guess what we need for riders is that if a fatality ends up occurring after the competition, so because of an injury or something like that, then notifying the governing body is only a good thing and that would help the governing body.

But in terms of reporting them, I’m not sure. It’s complicated, isn’t it? Because media reporting is important for transparency. But is there any benefit to the media reporting every single horse death? I’m not sure. No, and you’re quite right to say there’s a two factor thing there. What’s the point of, know, all you’re doing is, you

highlighting someone’s upset or whatever it might be. But also, yeah, if it happened a week later, following various tests from, you know, MSK and things like that, then at what point did you know, do you draw a line? Where, where, and we have to come up with my next question, actually, where did you draw a line on a horse? So if a horse had a muscular problem and then was put down, how do you, where did you say how long after the event?

To be honest, the ones that are included in our data set are the ones that are reported in the media tend to be the ones that died on site. yeah, I think the longest time there was after was because of sudden death immediately after cross-country or euthanasia pretty soon after cross-country. I don’t think any of them in our data set were like a long period after. Yeah.

No, okay, that’s interesting. And it’s, yeah, it’s a little bit worried. I mean, not your data, but it’s a little bit worrying to think that you had to discount over 100 or so because you couldn’t verify the information, but that’s reported. how many not reported? Yeah, and that’s the difference between research and science and things that aren’t science, because to publish this in a journal and go through peer review, we have to show that we’ve verified

the data that we can say with confidence that it’s accurate. Especially, you we published an ECHOIN Veterinary Journal, which are a good journal with thorough review. There are probably some journals who would have accepted it without that process, but I think we were, you know, especially you and I really keen to make sure that it was solid, because especially when you’re talking about fatalities, you don’t want to be putting anything out there that could be incorrect to you, because that’s harmful.

Absolutely. And I think it’s important at this point to point out that for those of people that don’t know you, you are a keen rider, you’ve invented, you’re an advocate for the sport and this is just great. Yeah, make it safer. I’m a critical friend. That’s how I describe myself. Yeah, I think in this day and age, we need more people like you and David who are inside the conversation.

but having these big serious research projects that are helping keep the support alive, not damage it in any way. Now that’s interesting. Yeah, keep that. It’s important to have the knowledge of the sport and understand ins and outs, but also have an objective head on when you’re looking at your research, which we, if anyone has read our papers, they’ll know that we have. Definitely.

One stat that really stood out to me and you did highlight it yourself that over 62 % were not from falls at fences. Yes, so we’re not associated with fences. What that would tell us is that they’re either sudden death or MSK injury. Yeah. you know, random. So they’re either a cyclical injury, which again, we know happens in racing as well, you know, investigated and reported in racing. MSK injuries don’t just happen out of the blue.

You could argue that an MSK injury that happens at a fence is more of a freak or acute incident that could be because they’ve hit the fence in a certain way. But an MSK injury that happens while moving has to be cyclical. That’s what the research shows. So, it’s one of the things we talked about actually. So there’s that aspect. And then the other one is the sudden death. So that’s a cardiac event tends to be. One of the things we talked about in the paper was, if we look at human sport,

I’m sure everyone has seen in the press over the last few years. And prior to that, there’s been some deaths in like football or some cardiac arrests, for example, right at the top level. And what they’ve started doing is implementing screening processes because they’re often associated with underlying subclinical cardiac conditions. So again, it’s not like it seems random, but actually the sort of physiology of it is that it’s not random. And actually there was something going on.

And when we know that, means that it is preventable. So it’s trying to find ways to identify those horses at risk of cardiac events or MSK injuries before they go so that that then doesn’t happen. But that, you know, is complicated and costly. And, you know, I know more than anything, because I’ve worked in it for so long, eventing, know, especially national federations, they’re financially challenged. And so it’s not like they have the

the spare money to be spending hundreds of thousands on, you know, screening and things like that. So I think it’s trying to find a way that is financially viable for the sport and for the people in the sport, but that also helps the horses. In racing, they have trialed screening the limbs, but again, it’s scanning and scans are expensive. And that’s why work like this is important. This is a very

like preliminary step into that. But if you look at the Horsfalls work, that’s what that is doing. You’re using masses of data and complex analyses to try and help the governing bodies identify those most at risk so they can put changes in and then improve the risk. And this is like the first step towards that for coin fatalities. No, it’s fantastic. is. No, it’s really good. And what do you think?

I I imagine you’ve passed this sort of research on to British Eventing and people like that to have a look at, have you? Because it was global and it involved so many different federations, national federations, we sent it to the FEI when we first submitted it, just so they were aware. I had some light discussions with British Eventing about it, but nothing, yeah, nothing formal. okay.

So that’s, it’s just, it’s wonderful to hear that, you know, that at least it’s being presented to them so that they have more information when they’re making these sort of big decisions about how things are run, I guess. So what do you, do you feel like the sort of take home messages for people, if any, what do you sort of hope that the research will leave with people?

I guess it’s the knowledge that horse falls aren’t the highest risk to horse and rider and that we should be lobbying for more work at the governing body level, at the research level, so us focusing on equine fatalities specifically. Because I think we accidentally, you know, unintended it, got lost into something, not lost, but we focused on something that…

you know, really affects the rider much more. And obviously we are very interested in the welfare and the longevity of our sport horses. So I think shifting the focus more to that now with all the work that’s being done on horse falls would be great. hopefully some of the governing bodies will have enough data and they’ll be willing to commission some formal research. I think that would be ideal. Now, I mean, without speaking for you as well, I feel like that’s a really good

point even from a low level event or grassroots event. It’s sometimes not the fence that you need to worry about, it’s whether your horse is strong enough and fit enough and just to make it round, but also to go on. And I think the one thing you can say about eventers is they’re abundantly clear of that because they have to do the three phases and get home somehow. So, that’s nice because

Just thinking back to all the research over the last 20 years into falls, particularly it has been about rider fatalities and rider falls and horse falls. But this, you know, over 62 % aren’t fall related, just that makes us now stop and look at the bits in between and afterwards and in the run up, I guess, which is important work. Definitely, yeah. And I just want to add as well that on that, you know, we’re talking about

things that happen not at a fence but on course that are risky to horses. You know if you’re thinking about MSK injury obviously the surface becomes important and we’ve had really limited research on surfaces for eventing because the way in which to do that has either just not been developed or it’s been complex and there’s a really amazing team working on that led by Professor Sarah Hobbs.

Actually at UCLan she’s at the same institution as I am and she was my director of studies on my PhD actually. So she and a whole team of different researchers from different places are working on assessing the ground condition at eventing courses. Yeah, so there’s a lot of work going on there and it will be great to see more of that work come out in the future as well because that’s going to…

be really important for looking at horse injury. No, surfacing is really interesting because I think it was this sort of time last year where David was working with the vet Mark Lacy, Mark Lacy, Lucy. Yes, he’s the one that helps with Sarah’s project as well. Thank you. Right. Okay, that makes sense now. his bowling ball. I made David take photos of him dropping the ball all right. But it’s interesting, it’s

It’s people like yourself and people like this that have seen where the issues are and you’re doing the research quite a lot of the time, not necessarily paid to be out there on the course dropping the balls and or, know, sat by a fence recording and all the other sort of studies you’ve got going on. And I just feel like, you know, our community doesn’t necessarily always appreciate you guys. You have them on paid labour. Driven by passion.

But it’s sort of you all feed into each other, don’t you? Your study, you know, and I’m sure your colleagues will look at that study and go, OK, and then that will feed into the there’s a whole network. Yeah, for sure. That’s brilliant. Well, thank you for that. really appreciate you sharing that bit of research with us. I know you’ve got other bits coming up that you’d like to talk to us about, which I’ll hopefully get you back on. So if anybody enjoyed watching this and listening to Heather about the most recent

published research, then please do check out her on the website and go back and have a look at her other studies as well and the webinars that she’s kindly given us on there about that because I think you’ll find it really interesting. And if you’re into eventing anyway, then it’s an absolute must because you’ll really come away with some information that will be helpful to you. But thank you, Heather. I really appreciate your time. Thank you. Thanks very much.