Post-surgical care and monitoring in horses requires attention to both physical recovery and psychological welfare during the constrained recovery period.
Post-surgical horse welfare requires simultaneously managing physical recovery and psychological wellbeing during a period when normal behavior is severely restricted. A horse in post-operative pain without adequate analgesia suffers acutely; the same horse in a bare box with no enrichment suffers additionally from the psychological stress of isolation and inactivity. Modern equine post-operative care addresses both dimensions through multimodal analgesia, environmental enrichment, controlled exercise introduction as early as medically safe, and social contact where possible. The welfare obligation continues through the full recovery period, not just the immediate post-operative phase.