An ancient hippodrome has been discovered in recent months at Olympia. This seemed a topical post given the imminent start of the Olympic Games.

Archaelogists have been continuously excavating the site since since 1875 and the discovery confirms historic writings about the racecourse from the 2nd Century AD. However it had been assumed that the remains had been lost as a result of floodings in the area.

Horses were the number one cause of animal-related deaths in Australia between 2000 and 2006 according to research done by the National Coroners Information System in Australia.

Of the 128 animal-related deaths during the period, 40 involved horses, 20 cattle and 12 dogs. By comparison, some of the more dangerous animals numbered a lot less with sharks killing 11 people, crocodiles or alligators 4, snakes 8 and spiders 3.

The numbers are a bit of a surprise but people do interract with domesticated animals much more frequently, so if the report showed the percentage of the interractions with the various animal types, the domesticated animals wouldn’t appear as dangerous.

I was taught from a young age to be careful when handling horses as they are both powerful and unpredictable. Experience over the years has just confirmed this to be true.

As I have written a lot about eventing falls and the need for cross country design changes, I thought I should mention some recent Australian research which followed up with approx 900 riders involved in accidents. It found that most riders thought they were mainly to blame for the fall and it could have been avoided . Other factors like illness, spectators, weather, poor fence design, equipment failure were small in number.

While I was initially surprised by this, I realised that this is likely to be the case for any sort of accident as the rider is supposed to be in control of the situation. Isn’t the same true in most car driving accidents?

Some other interesting findings were that few riders landed on their heads and quite a few landed feet first. Also riders felt that back protectors were effective in reducing injury. Wearing a back protector can be a little uncomfortable at first but I would strongly recommend one for cross-country. Like anything, the more you wear it the more you become used to it.

Recent research has found that horses do learn bad habits from other horses, such as crib biting, weaving and box walking. Approx 5% of horses have such problems and the research proved that the risk of a horse developing such problems is significantly increased if a neighbouring horse has such a problem.

We had a horse with such problems and were always concerned that the other horses would pick this up, particularly the youngsters but this didn’t happen. Maybe because our horses were mainly kept outside for much of the day and so weren’t standing in stables for extended periods.