The Oxford Residential- Redwings Horse Sanctuary

A group of students from the FdSc Animal Behaviour & Psychology and the FdSc Animal Husbandry & Welfare courses have just returned from an exciting annual field trip to Oxford. The three day residential trip involved tours and hands-on experience at the Hearing Dogs for Deaf People Centre, Red Wings Horse Sanctuary, the Guide Dogs for the Blind Centre and the UK Wolf Conservation Centre. Check back over the course of this week for student Emily Hall's write up of the trip.

The Oxford Residential- a student experience (part 2)

By Emily Hall- FdSc Animal Husbandry and Welfare

Redwings Horse Sanctuary 

Situated in Oxhill, this centre is one of 10 across the UK, with up to 1,500 Horses, Ponies, Donkeys and Mules. All the centres aim to promote the care and protection of these animals and educate owners and future generations with the best ethical training techniques.

The Redwings Horse Sanctuary focuses on the behaviour of an individual horse and the possible causes of those behaviours. Since horses have photographic memories it is possible that undesired behaviour is the consequence of a bad occurrence in the horse’s history, and as a flight animal, reminders of these incidents may trigger unwanted behaviour. All horses that arrive at the centre are rehabilitated with gentle conditioning, and roughly 150 are rehomed every year, with the horse being on permanent loan to the new owner.

While Redwings cannot prosecute, and pursue cases of abandonment, abuse/neglect, they do however work alongside the RSPCA in procuring a prosecution and order against the abuser. Sometimes horse owners approach the centre in need of help due to things becoming too much for them, they may be too elderly and simply cannot care for the animals anymore. In these circumstances the horses are signed over and previous owners are not charged with any neglect.


On the other hand, some horses come in completely feral having had no real care and protection such as Little My, whose owners bred for show purposes but due to her old age and the quantity of horses she owned, she simply could not handle the amount of time and effort that was needed to care for all of them. They were consequently signed over and no further action was taken.

Little My

Little My has taken six months of gentle encouragement and daily sessions to be at her current point of accepting touch (she had never been handled prior), and accepting head collars. Trainers at the centre suggested an average of two months of consecutive training to be at this point in most cases, but feral individuals may require more time invested.

Redwings are the largest horse sanctuary in the UK, and have over 250 members of staff across ten sites. The students were impressed with the size of the facility and the sheer number of cases the organisation takes in, along with their success rate.

One thing that must be said about Redwings, as interesting and as brilliant an opportunity it was to visit the centre, it was VERY cold, I’d advise any students thinking of visiting in the future to make sure they have thermal under layers or just lots of layers!