JOURNALIST Liz Jones was among the panellists at the World Horse Welfare annual conference.

The Daily Mail columnist is known for her controversial articles and her outspoken views, and she has often written about issues of animal rights.

When talking (Liz Jones) about three of the things that appalled her – like horses in Ethiopia with wounds on their sides known as “accelerators”, or seeing a little boy beat a donkey with an iron pole – she also mentioned horses being locked up in their stables for 23 hours out of the day.

Referring to the “confinement” of horses, Liz said: “To me, stables are to horses what battery cages are to hens – there is no difference.”

Can the three scenarios really be classed as similar levels of cruelty? Certainly two of the three points can, but can keeping a horse in a stable for 23 hours really be classed as cruelty when they have food and water, shelter, exercise, and their essential healthcare needs met?

We all know the health implications of keeping a horse cooped up in a stable all day, every day. We know about stereotypes, more commonly known as stable vices, and we know about the problems caused by altering the horse’s natural lifestyle of trickle grazing and constant movement, such as the increased chance of colic or gastric ulcers. But sometimes daily turnout isn’t always possible, sometimes because of short-term problems like waterlogged fields, other times because turnout isn’t available or practical.

All horse lovers have a wide-range of opinions, from those who think horses should only live out, who should be ridden without metal in their mouths or nailed to their feet, to those who compete at the highest levels, whose horses are treated as elite athletes and spend most of their time in a stable.

But most people opt for a midway point, that of providing daily turnout for their horse with a warm stable to come into at night. Olympian Carl Hester will turn his hugely valuable dressage horses out in the paddock each day, and he’s far from the only top competition rider to do so.

There are urban riding schools whose horses are stabled for most of the year, but who get a “summer holiday” where they live out 24/7. Similarly, lots of racehorses get to have a break out of season, some downtime in the field and an opportunity to be, well, just a horse.

The vision of all horses living out full time is an idyllic but often impractical one. Some are not hardy enough to live out for 24 hours all year round; some would over-eat if given unrestricted access to grass. Horse owners have restrictions on their own lives and time and most of us must make some sort of compromise to strike a balance between our horse’s needs and our own.

If horses who are stabled full-time and are given an occasional break and plenty of daily exercise, then surely that does not equate their lives to those of a battery hen.

Compare the existence of cared for but confined horses with those abandoned equines littered across the British countryside. The latter are given all the freedom in the world, but none of the most basic requirements. If you were one of those horses, which would you rather be?