About Me.
My name is Rebecca Nairn, known as Becks on socials. I’m a 38 year old mother to three boys.
I’m the owner of 6 P.R.Es/Andalusians, one warmblood and a Standardbred.
I didn’t start this journey with horses thinking “gee one day I'd love to be well known for dissecting horses” far from it. I remember thinking at 18 that putting a horse down that wasn’t obviously dying was an inconceivable idea. Because at this stage I was taking in ‘difficult’ horses and ponies for retraining, making amazing turn arounds with them and reselling for a profit
Why I started dissecting?
Rehoming Race Horses
I became confident working with deceased animals. At 16, I have worked for 5 major taxidermists and I thoroughly enjoyed the work. Even though I own zero taxidermy animals, I have always appreciated the skill. I have had the chance to work on many exotic animals that most people will never get the chance to see. In Queenstown, I got to work on a national celebrity sheep “Shrek” who now resides at our national museum for managing to evade being herded for 6 odd years in the High country of New Zealand.
In 2018 a group of us got together when a local rehomer of standardised race horses was going through a tough patch personally and thought she couldn’t keep going but felt the huge burden of what would happen to the horses if she stopped?
We decided to start a registered charity called Stable to Stirrup with the aim of having the racing industry pay for this service. I was the operations manager of the horse aspect and held a board of trustees position. We took in 100 odd horses annually from the South Island region as well as undertaking two huge rescue missions of 21 standardbreds and the second was 44.
It was a really challenging time for me being involved daily with horses that showed the mental and physical scars of the pressures of racing. Having to be involved with the governing body of racing who wanted to paint everything with rosetinted glasses and not address the elephant in the room which was, welfare in racing. Things that many people are not aware of, such as starting horses to cart as weanlings which is not as common but starting as a yearling is common practice.
We made good headway with the charity, it is now very wellfunded by the industry and has a sustainable future.
I wanted to look deeper to why these horses all seemed broken, that's when I started diccecting them.
Findings
Broken Horses
As I started my dissections on race horses, it was a big shock to see the stark differences once I started dissecting un-started horses. Something I never see in the un-started horses is damage to the growth plates like I would in race horses.
Thoroughbreds had damage in the thoracic spine growth plates. Standardbreds had damage to the growth plates in the neck from the fixed high posture.
Growth plates refer to the cartilage connection between physis and diaphysis, it’s meant to fuse evenly along the physis. However, in racehorses, I often find the ventral side of the union between physis and diaphysis open in horses up to 13 years. This leads me to the hypothesis that growth plates are on a biological clock for closure and if damaged they never complete closure. It appears to be the same with pelvises and I recently gained a deeper understanding of this with two newborn foal dissections. Pelvises are a vital pillar for stability in a horse’s body and yet have been largely ignored in scientific studies. To see a foal’s pelvis start out in FOUR separate pieces is a marvel to behold.
The main union between the two lateral halves is the pubis symphysis which doesn’t fuse until 6 years old. When I first started I thought the Tuber Sacrale were meant to touch each other and that the pelvis along the ventral edge of the pubis symphysis was meant to stay open. It was only when I started talking with other researchers who mainly dissected pleasure horses we realised how many differences there were. It blew my mind.
What I am trying to Achieve
More awareness!
So what am I trying to achieve with the work I’m doing?
I’m trying to give people some insights into how their horse's bodies work, highlight weaknesses and the fragility of how interconnected they are. I think people mistake their size for strength but being quadrupeds their strength relies heavily on balancing across the 4 legs and the stability of the spine. I think we are often breaking their bodies before they have even arrived at maturity and for what? Ribbons? Accolades? trophies?
The future of horse sports relies on social license and governing bodies need to think about what that means in modern society, exploiting the horse's subservient nature is no longer acceptable when it’s detrimental to their bodies. All my life horses have offered me something I can’t find anywhere else; connection and belonging……it’s time we do better
My Portfolio
Welcome to my portfolio. Here you’ll find a selection of my work. Explore my projects to learn more about what I do.
