Poor tack fitting causes chronic pain and behavioral problems in leisure horses, and regular professional saddle fitting is a fundamental welfare requirement.
Tack fitting is a welfare issue hiding in plain sight across the leisure horse population. A horse that resists, is tense under saddle, or shows behavioral problems may be communicating tack discomfort that has gone unrecognized. Horses cannot say 'this hurts' - they demonstrate discomfort through behavioral responses that are often misattributed to willfulness or poor training rather than pain. Regular professional saddle fitting, appropriate bit selection, and use of validated behavioral pain assessment tools during ridden work are the welfare responses that address tack-related pain at scale across the leisure horse population.