Equine biosecurity practices protect individual horse welfare and herd health by preventing introduction and spread of infectious diseases, with systematic approaches yielding significant welfare and economic benefits.
Equine biosecurity is fundamentally a welfare issue because infectious disease outbreaks cause significant suffering in affected horses and necessitate quarantine restrictions that disrupt normal horse social lives and management. Strangles, despite its name as a common equine disease, causes real suffering through painful abscessation, fever, difficulty swallowing, and potential complications. EHM outbreaks create neurological suffering and high mortality. The welfare cost of good biosecurity — temporary quarantine of new horses, equipment decontamination, movement restriction during outbreaks — is vastly smaller than the welfare cost of outbreaks that result from biosecurity failures. Horse owners who resist biosecurity practices, believing their horses are healthy and therefore not at risk, fail to understand that disease introduction comes from apparently healthy carriers.