I recently came across several videos showing sped-up photo editing by some skilled equine photographers, and while I admire their talent and skill and think the work they do is incredible, I worry about some of the practices involved. In one of the videos, a yearling was edited to remove moulting patches, but also to erase an aversive piece of equipment from the image: a nose chain. This disturbs me for a number of reasons, not just because I don’t believe metal chains should be used anywhere near a horse’s face, let alone a yearling, but also because the photographer/editor was hiding it from view by removing it. How many other horses are having painful tack or aversive equipment erased from their images?
Another issue I found was the altering of expression. In multiple videos demonstrating the editing process, individuals would switch between photos, or even use alternative horses, to replace a horse's backwards-facing ears with forward ones instead. When it comes to horse photos we are all familiar with the desperate attempts to get the horse to have their ears forwards, but when a ridden horse has their ears edited in this manner it removes an aspect of that horse's communication at that moment.
A post I did a while ago about stress signals discussed various ear-related signs, and research into pain identification also discusses the ears. Stiffly held ears, and backwards ears, are a sign of discomfort and stress in most research. In the ridden horse pain ethogram (Dyson et al., 2018) asymmetric ears or ears behind the vertical for 5 seconds or more are one of the signs of discomfort. How many images are out there of horses who were displaying discomfort, stress, or pain, which was then edited out because it wasn’t aesthetically pleasing? When we become better at understanding other stress signs, will people begin to remove and edit these out too, and how can we know that the horses we are seeing are being honestly represented?
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