Mounted police deployment for public-order policing: a teleonomic analysis of welfare implications and organisational risk

This analysis examines the welfare implications of deploying horses in public-order policing through the lens of recent conceptual developments in animal welfare science. Drawing on observational evidence, peer-reviewed literature on police horse training and selection, and three analytical frameworks (the teleonome concept, the COMPASS Guidelines, and the Five Domains Model), we explore potential incompatibilities between equine biological organisation and operational public-order environments. The teleonomic framework suggests that aversive public-order conditions present environmental challenges for which horses lack evolved adaptive mechanisms, demanding suppression of threat assessment, affective experience, and flight responses that natural selection shaped for equine survival. Mounted police horses may be exposed to chemical agents, projectiles, fire, noise, and sustained crowd chaos, all of which activate evolved threat-detection and punishment-avoidance systems. Critical examination of the empirical literature raises questions about whether training research has adequately distinguished genuine affective calm from behavioural suppression and learned helplessness. Whether any training programme can allow a horse to enter a teleonomic comfort zone, as distinct from conditioned suppression to stimuli that represent authentic threats, remains unresolved: fear extinction in mammals is context-specific and prone to reinstatement under the high-intensity, unpredictable, and socially transmitted arousal conditions characteristic of public disorder. A small subset of police horses reach operational suitability, but whether this reflects resolved negative affect or continued suppression is unknown. The Five Domains Model is applied to map public-order-relevant stressors across nutritional, physical, health, behavioural, and mental state domains and grade their negative welfare impacts. A One Welfare perspective further examines implications for human welfare (officer and public safety, occupational health) and organisational considerations, including legal liability, reputational risk, and resource allocation. We identify methodological limitations in existing research, particularly the inability of physiological metrics to differentiate genuine affective outcomes from chronic behavioural suppression, and discuss evidence gaps warranting further investigation. Rather than advocating specific policy outcomes, this article offers police administrators, policymakers, and welfare scientists a framework for evaluating current practices and evidence, applying the teleonomic framework, COMPASS Guidelines, and Five Domains/One Welfare perspectives to characterise equine-environment fit, welfare risk, and organisational risk, and to identify research priorities that currently limit confident policy conclusions.