The Blind Spot: The Equine Industry's 11 Year Data Gap

The Blind Spot

THE U.S. EQUINE INDUSTRY'S 11-YEAR DATA GAP IS FINALLY CLOSING. WHETHER IT CLOSES WELL DEPENDS ON WHO ANSWERS.

The American horse industry contributes $177 billion to the U.S. economy annually and supports 2.2 million jobs. It maintains a population of roughly 6.6 million horses. And the last time the federal government conducted a comprehensive national study of equine health and management practices was 2015.

That is about to change. This month, the USDA's National Animal Health Monitoring System has launched the Equine 2026 Study, the first nationwide assessment of its kind in eleven years. Representatives from the National Agricultural Statistics Service are now contacting randomly selected equine operations across all fifty states to complete a questionnaire covering biosecurity, disease occurrence, veterinary access, emergency preparedness, and the management of horses in vocational transition. The study is the broadest in the programme's history. Its predecessor, Equine 2015, reached only twenty-eight states.

Whether the data is any good depends on a detail that has nothing to do with methodology: participation is voluntary. And the equine industry's relationship with being counted has never been straightforward.

What the Last Snapshot Found

NAHMS has conducted equine studies on a roughly decadal cycle: 1998, 2005, 2015, and now 2026. Each study produces a baseline, a snapshot of how the industry manages its animals, what diseases are circulating, what veterinary resources are available, and where practices fall short. The data shapes federal policy, informs research funding priorities, and provides the factual foundation that veterinary organisations, breed registries, and show-governing bodies rely on when making decisions about health and welfare standards.

The Equine 2015 study, which surveyed operations with five or more equids across twenty-eight states representing 71.8 percent of the national herd, produced findings that remain the industry's most current reference points. Among the biosecurity data: only 19.7 percent of operations required visitors to sanitise their hands. Just 12.9 percent required the use of separate or disinfected equipment. And 11.2 percent required visitors to park vehicles away from animal areas. These were not niche operations. They represented the industry's cross-section, from backyard holdings to professional training facilities.

Those numbers were collected eleven years ago. In the time since, the industry has endured a pandemic, a veterinary workforce crisis, and a multistate disease outbreak that tested every assumption those numbers underpinned.

What Eleven Years Changes

In November 2025, an outbreak of equine herpesvirus type 1 linked to the World Championship Barrel Racing Finals in Waco, Texas, spread across eight states. The American Veterinary Medical Association confirmed sixty cases, forty-seven of which presented with neurological signs. Events were cancelled. Horses were quarantined. And the outbreak exposed exactly the kind of gap that outdated data creates: response protocols were informed by biosecurity baselines that were, at that point, a decade old.

The AAEP, in partnership with the Equine Disease Communication Center, had already identified the problem. A multi-year biosecurity project funded by a USDA APHIS grant released its final report in June 2025. A cross-sectional survey of horse owners conducted as part of that effort, published in Animals in 2023 by Nathaniel White of the EDCC and Angela Pelzel-McCluskey of USDA APHIS, found that most owners were not highly concerned about the risk of infectious disease or the use of biosecurity practices, with significant gaps in isolation protocols, temperature monitoring, and entry requirements at events where horses co-mingle.

Meanwhile, the horse population itself has shifted. The American Horse Council's 2023 National Economic Impact Study found the U.S. horse population had declined from 7.2 million in 2017 to 6.6 million in 2023, a drop of roughly eight percent. Yet over the same period, the industry's total economic impact rose forty-five percent, from $122 billion to $177 billion. Fewer horses are generating more economic activity. The demographics of ownership, the geography of the herd, the demands placed on veterinary infrastructure have all evolved. The data describing them has not.

What the Study Will and Will Not Do

The 2026 study's expansion to all fifty states is significant. The twenty-eight-state footprint of the 2015 study, while representing nearly three-quarters of the national herd, left entire regions uncounted. Operations in states with growing equine populations, many of them in the Southeast and Mountain West, contributed nothing to the national picture. The fifty-state scope of the 2026 study should produce a more complete map of where horses are, how they are managed, and what veterinary resources their owners can access.

The study's emphasis on biosecurity, emergency preparedness, and veterinary service availability reflects what the intervening decade has made obvious. The EHV-1 outbreak, the accelerating shortage of large-animal practitioners, and the industry's uneven adoption of basic disease-prevention protocols are not separate problems. They are symptoms of a single condition: an industry that moves millions of animals across state lines every year for competition, breeding, and sale, without a current understanding of its own biosecurity posture.

What the study will not do, at least not yet, is sample biology. Phase II of the Equine 2026 Study, originally planned to include questionnaires and biologic sampling at equine events in thirty states, has been postponed pending resource availability. NAHMS will evaluate its capacity to proceed in spring 2027. That is a consequential omission. Questionnaires capture what owners report. Biologic sampling captures what is actually circulating, the subclinical infections, the seroprevalence, the pathogens moving through the show circuit without clinical detection. For sport-horse owners, Phase II was arguably the more valuable half of the study. Its deferral means the biological picture will remain, for now, incomplete.

The Sport-Horse Stake

The competition sector of the American equine industry accounts for $36.7 billion in economic impact and supports nearly 467,000 jobs, according to the American Horse Council's 2023 study. It is also, by design, the sector most exposed to infectious disease transmission. Show horses travel. They share arenas, wash racks, and warm-up rings with horses from other states and other management systems. They rotate through temporary stabling on weekly cycles. Every horse show is a mixing event, and every mixing event is a biosecurity test.

Other countries have recognised this and built accordingly. In the Netherlands, the Surveillance of Equine Infectious Diseases system, known as SEIN, has operated since 2019 as a voluntary but continuous laboratory-confirmed surveillance programme for EHV-1, EHV-4, equine influenza, and strangles. It provides near-real-time data on what is circulating, where, and in what populations. In Canada, a 2025 study published in Frontiers in Veterinary Science surveyed equestrian competition organisers in Ontario about their biosecurity perspectives and practices, generating granular data on how events manage disease risk at the ground level.

The United States, home to the world's largest equine industry by economic output, relies on periodic snapshot studies separated by a decade or more. The difference is not merely one of frequency. It is a difference in the kind of knowledge available to decision-makers. Continuous surveillance tells you what is happening now. A decadal study tells you what was happening then. When the next EHV-1 cluster emerges at a major show circuit, and veterinary epidemiologists look for a current national baseline of biosecurity practices and vaccination compliance to compare against, the best data they will have, until this study's results are published, will be from 2015.

The Envelope

The questionnaires began arriving in mailboxes in July. NASS representatives are now conducting follow-up contacts by telephone, online, and in person. The study is confidential. Individual responses will never be published. The data matters only in aggregate, and it matters only if enough operations respond.

This is where the sport-horse community has an outsized role to play. The NAHMS 2015 study found that eleven percent of operations with twenty or more horses accounted for forty-two percent of the national herd. Professional barns, show operations, and competition-focused facilities are disproportionately important to the study's accuracy. Their participation, or absence, skews the picture for the entire industry.

An industry that does not measure itself gets governed by assumptions. The veterinary access policies, the biosecurity standards at show venues, the research funding that determines which diseases are studied and which treatments are developed, all of it rests on data. When the data is eleven years old, the assumptions age with it. The NAHMS Equine 2026 Study is not a bureaucratic exercise. It is the industry drawing its own portrait. If you receive the questionnaire, the most consequential thing you can do for the next decade of equine health is fill it out.