July 2026

Winston Churchill once observed that there is something about the outside of a horse that is good for the inside of a human. Millions of horse owners worldwide know this truth instinctively. Whether they're out stables before dawn, saving for veterinary care, or simply standing quietly with their horse after a difficult day, they're already trying to do the best for their horses.

But there's a difference between wanting to do the best and knowing what is actually best for horses. What is it that genuinely serves horses' welfare rather than merely satisfying our own assumptions about what they need? How can we be certain our best intentions translate into their best lives?

The International Society for Equitation Science (ISES) believes we now have the scientific framework to help close this gap to help us transform good intentions into genuine understanding, and that understanding into better care for horses worldwide.  To that end, ISES is announcing its groundbreaking new project: The Nature of Horses: Decoding the Equine Teleonome

What is the Teleonome?

This project is grounded in work published in Frontiers in Animal Science (Wilkins et al., 2026). Independent reviewers have described this framework as a "real breakthrough" and an "ambitious conceptual innovation" in animal welfare science.

The teleonome—pronounced tee-lee-on-ohm—is a newly proposed biological construct: a single term for the integrated system of evolved capabilities: perception, anatomy, physiology, behaviour and feeling, through which animals maintain viability and pursue their own goals.

In plain terms, it is the whole set of tools evolution has given a horse to look after itself: its senses, body, behaviour and feelings, all working together. Think of it as a horse's built-in guidance system, telling it what matters moment to moment: find food, stay with the herd, avoid pain, keep moving. It explains not just what horses do, but why.

Central to the teleonome are three concepts.

• Choice (agency). Horses are motivated to act on their world, to make decisions, explore, act in ways to deliver outcomes that matter to them.
• Opportunity (affordances). Opportunities in their social and physical environments that enable actions to deliver outcomes that matter.
• Feelings and emotions (sentience). The capacity to feel.  Pain, curiosity, fear and comfort are genuinely felt states, not just physiology, and they tell a horse what to seek, what to avoid, and how urgently and how well it is doing.

Here’s an example:

A horse stabled alone with plenty of hay and water may have their basic physiological needs met.  But those are not all it needs.  Its sensory and social systems evolved to motivate it to bond with other horses, explore its environment and stay on the move. Even in a stable with enough to eat they are still active.  If it can’t access those affordances, it will get frustrated, anxious or depressed. The mismatch between what it has evolved to care about and what its environment offers it accumulates over time and can lead to longer term issues for its mental and physical health. Issues that can be hard to detect using standard methods of welfare assessment.

The teleonome gives equitation science a precise framework for identifying how we keep, care and train horses supports or frustrates their evolved goals and motivational systems from the perspective of the whole horse, not just single outcomes or emotions in isolation.

What does "decoding" the equine telenome mean in practice?

The teleonome is a starting point, not a finished answer. Decoding it means gathering what we know about horses, being honest about what we don't, and using both to judge whether their lives are genuinely going well. It also has to be specific to horses: a good life for a horse is not the same as for a dog or a person. ISES will lead this work across four connected areas:

• Mapping what horses need, and finding the gaps, drawing on evolution, behaviour and the science of emotion.
• Putting welfare needs in the right order, ranking them the way a horse itself would, from urgent threats like pain through to longer-term needs like companionship, and testing those rankings with evidence rather than opinion.
• Looking honestly at how we treat horses, asking which training, competition and work practices suit a horse's nature and which get in its way.
• Integrating existing ISES frameworks: Grounding the Society's resources and position statements in a shared biological rationale so that each initiative reflects a coherent picture of what horses are, not just what they do for us. After twenty years of building individual tools, we now have the unifying construct to identify and study what matters to them in welfare terms.

An Invitation

Systematically decoding the equine teleonome: drawing on evolutionary biology, ethology, physiology and affective neuroscience requires sustained, funded effort. ISES has built equitation science as an internationally recognised discipline through twenty years of dedicated volunteer work. This project demands a different level of institutional support than volunteer dedication alone can provide.

If you have felt that connection Churchill described and if you're one of the millions who already want to do the best for your horses, this is your opportunity to ensure that science keeps up with that ambition. Donations to ISES are investments in science-led welfare improvements that change how horses are understood, trained, and cared for worldwide. Unlike short-term campaigns, this project builds permanent institutional capacity for independent research that serves horses for generations to come.

The Nature of Horses offers a pathway to supporting all who care about their horses to do the best for them in the truest sense: not by projecting what we think they need, but by understanding what they actually require to thrive.

How to Support This Work

To support the project: https://ises.mykajabi.com/donate

For more information: www.equitationscience.com

About ISES

The International Society for Equitation Science (ISES) is a UK Registered Charity (No. 1176401) dedicated to promoting objective research to improve the welfare of horses. For over twenty years, hundreds of researchers have volunteered through Scientific Committees and conference proceedings, building equitation science as an internationally recognised discipline grounded in evidence, rigour, and independence from commercial interests.