What Is the Horse Experiencing?
February 11, 2026 @ 12:00PM — 1:00PM Eastern Time (US & Canada) Add to Calendar
: PO Box 23367 Chagrin Falls, OH 44022 Get Directions
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What is the Horse Experiencing? Welfare, learning and the systems we build
Lisa Ashton is an equitation science consultant and educator whose work focuses on how horses experience the systems we build around them. Rather than telling us what to think, Lisa invites us into a shared inquiry grounded in welfare science, learning theory and neuroscience. This session is about curiosity, reflection and practical sense-making, and we encourage you to engage in the chat and polls as we go. The guiding question for this webinar is simple, and challenging: What is the horse experiencing?”
Conversations about horse welfare are often emotionally charged, polarized, or reduced to individual behavior. Join HHRF and Lisa Ashton on February 11, 2026 at noon (EST) as Lisa takes a deliberately different approach.
Rather than prescribing solutions or allocating blame, Lisa will invite participants into a shared inquiry grounded in welfare science, learning theory and neuroscience. Using one guiding question — What is the horse experiencing? — we explore how equestrian outcomes are shaped not only by individual actions, but by the mindsets, skillsets and systemsets we operate within every day.
The webinar is designed as an interactive conversation rather than a lecture. It will include live polls, brief reflection prompts and audience Q&A, and is intended for anyone interested in creating equestrian practices that are evidence-informed, ethical and sustainable, for both horses and humans.
Lisa Ashton (MBA, PGCE, Dip Equitation Science) is an Equitation Science consultant, educator, and author working at the intersection of equitation science, education, and cultural change. She is the Education Officer for the International Society for Equitation Science (ISES, 2025–2029) and Project Lead for the ABRS+ Equicentric Futures Project, funded by Sport England and British Equestrian.
Lisa’s work applies the First Principles of Horse Training (ISES, 2018) and the Five Domains Model (Mellor et al., 2020) through a realist-informed, evidence-based lens to support welfare-centred practice across equestrian systems. As a pracademic, she bridges applied practice and academic rigour, with a particular focus on horse welfare literacy, reflexive praxis, and learning cultures within equestrian communities, always prioritising the horse’s lived experience.
At Hartpury University, Lisa leads Level 7 teaching in Applied Equine Cognition and Learning, integrating learning theory and neuroscience to explore how equestrian mindsets shift from tradition-led beliefs toward evidence-informed curiosity.
She is the author of Welfare Horse Sports: A Blueprint for Positive Change (Taylor & Francis, 2025), which offers a whole-systems roadmap for embedding welfare as the foundation of sustainable equestrian sport.