Equine squatters: the topic that united the Countryside Alliance and the RSPCA

In September last year I wrote about horses being illegally grazed and abandoned, and the inability of landowners to do anything about it. Back then, the government were poised to debate the topic for two hours in a bid to find some kind of solution to the problem. It’s not an issue that gets all that much attention in the media – after all, how much of a problem can a few ponies be?

But fly-grazing, as this is called – actually causes a huge amount of trouble, for the horses themselves and for the people whose land they end up on, be that a private landowner or a local authority. The problem was that landowners had very little power to remove these horses from their land, which made these fly-grazed horses hugely costly, not just to farmers and landowners, but also to the taxpayer.