04/09/2026
A few decades ago, animal welfare researchers began to look more deeply into the basic needs of animals, and they came up with what is known as the Five Freedoms, and these are:
🌀 Freedom from hunger and thirst
🌀 Freedom from discomfort
🌀 Freedom from pain, injury and disease
🌀 Freedom to express normal behaviours
🌀 Freedom from fear and distress
These 5 freedoms are all about the proper care of animals, like horses, to enable them to live in a healthy way.
If you look at them more closely, you will see that they are all about providing the bare essentials to life; they are not focused at all on how to make a horse’s life more worthwhile or enjoyable for their own sake.
Part of the reason that this has not previously come into our consciousness is because the study of positive welfare states of animals is quite new.
More recently, scientists began to look beyond what gives an animal a physically healthy life, to now considering what can we do as animal caretakers, to make an animal’s life worth living.
As we began to learn more about the effects of depriving animals from certain other mental needs, a new model emerged, known as The Five Domains Model of Animal Welfare.
The Five Domains Model of Animal Welfare focuses on moving beyond the basic care of animals to a ‘life worth living’. It is about the difference between care and welfare.
The welfare of an animal comes about when we enable it to access an optimal life.
The 5 Domains Model focuses on four major areas of an animal’s life that each contribute to the fifth domain, which is the mental domain (mental welfare).
💡 Attached is a summarising diagram of The 2020 Five Domains Model of animal welfare for equines from Modern Horse Training: Equitation Science Principles & Practice, Volume 1 which is available for purchase on our website.
