TOUCHING WILD with Bonny Mealand
WILD PONIES IN MORVERN
CalaMhòr
A Living Landscape for Understanding What Matters to Horses
A place where horses, landscapes and people help us better understand horse welfare.
CalaMhòr
A place where horses, landscapes and people help us better understand horse welfare.
Across the world, we continue to ask
how we can improve horse welfare.
Yet many of our answers come from
studying horses living in environments
shaped by people.
CalaMhòr begins with a different question.
Across the world, we continue to ask how we can improve horse welfare.
Yet many of our answers come from studying horses living in environments shaped by people.
CalaMhòr begins with a different question.
What can we learn by observing horses living lives that are more closely aligned with their evolutionary history?
What is CalaMhòr?
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CalaMhòr is a living landscape for understanding what matters to horses.
Set within a recovering Atlantic rainforest on Scotland's west coast, native ponies live as part of a landscape-scale nature restoration project. Supported to live rich, species-appropriate lives, they offer a rare opportunity to observe the behaviours, relationships and ecological interactions that underpin positive welfare.
Rather than asking horses to adapt to our management systems, CalaMhòr explores what becomes possible when management adapts to the needs of horses.
Why does this matter?
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Understanding horses
Observing behaviour as it unfolds naturally.
Understanding welfare
Building evidence for what helps horses thrive.
Understanding landscapes
Exploring how horses contribute to healthy ecosystems.
More than conservation grazing
To restore landscapes is to restore possibility.
Possibility for biodiversity to flourish.
Possibility for horses to express the lives they evolved to live.
Possibility for people to better understand what matters to horses.
CalaMhòr is more than a conservation grazing project.
It is a living landscape where observation, science and collaboration come together to deepen our understanding of horses and improve their future welfare.
How we're learning
Building knowledge from the lives horses choose to live.
🐴 Behaviour
Watching behaviour as it unfolds naturally, revealing how horses communicate, make decisions and respond to the world around them.
🌿 Ecology
Understanding how horses interact with vegetation, soils and wildlife, and the ecological roles they play within dynamic landscapes.
❤️ Welfare
Investigating how species-appropriate lives support physical health, emotional wellbeing and opportunities for positive experiences.
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📊 Research
Combining careful field observation with scientific enquiry to build evidence that can inform future horse management and welfare.
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🤝 Collaboration
Bringing together researchers, practitioners, students and local communities to share ideas, questions and discoveries.
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👥 Social Relationships
Learning from their multi-level, complex societies
Ways to get involved
Collaborate
Researchers
Universities
Students
Learn
Courses
Field visits
Workshops
Follow the journey
News
Project updates
Stories from the herd
Research findings
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Follow the journey
The ponies have only recently begun their lives in the rainforest, and every season brings new observations, new questions and new discoveries.
By joining us now, you'll be following the project from its very beginning.