Guides.

Long-form guides on keeping and knowing horses, written from the governing bodies’ own documents rather than from received wisdom. Every figure on these pages is sourced and dated, and where the published advice contradicts itself we say so rather than picking whichever number reads best.

They sit alongside the short answers, which handle single questions in a couple of hundred words, and the breed pages, which cover a particular horse. Start wherever you actually are.

Care and keeping

The horse rug guide — when to rug, what the fill weights actually mean, and why the published charts disagree with each other by a whole category.

Racing

Point-to-point and the jumps season — the only British racing tied to hunting, what a Hunter Certificate is, and how it feeds National Hunt.

After racing — what the first Thoroughbred Census found: 33,600 former racehorses, and most of them are not competing.

Also worth reading

Two of the most-asked questions are long enough to be guides in their own right: what a horse really costs to keep, where the published figures range from £5,350 to £14,820 a year for reasons nobody explains, and what makes a Thoroughbred, which turns out to be a matter of a rulebook rather than a look.

More guides are being added as each subject earns a page of its own. Who writes them, and the standard they are held to, is on the about page.

Written by Craig Fearn, Stable & Hoof.