Where horses are kept varies widely depending on where you are and resources. Where I am on the west coast, stalls or, hopeful stalls with paddocks are where horses live 24/7. There aren't always other options. With my first horse, the option I had was a stall at night, and then they were walked to tiny paddocks about 15 by15 feet. But, I managed, for the most part, to find situations where I could keep them in "pasture," which is not what you might think. Here, that could be a medium to larger sized "paddock" in other areas. It is pretty rare here to have a "pasture" situation where there is actually enough forage to feed the horses, so mostly it is en space where they can move at will and are fed. I am lucky now to have a situation where mine are on about 10 acres (I think?) of hills, and they live in a herd that varies from 10-15 horses. The conditioning, socialization, and natural situation makes up for any drawbacks for weather situations or me having to hike to get them.
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Ideally, a horse lives in a pretty close to "natural" situation. In the wild, horses move about 25 miles a day on a variety of terrain. What is available where you live will dictate what options you may have. I am super lucky even though I live in one of the most expensive ares in the country, I am surrounded by hills, much of which is parkland, and I started riding in these hills. Over the decades we have lost a lot of stabling options, but I have been able to keep my horses in some version of "pasture" situation, which is a group of horses free in some open area.
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Why is this SO important? Conditioning of the body, keeping the body healthy, and keeping the mind healthy. I 100% know I have not been just "lucky" in having the soundest horses of anyone who rarely get seriously hurt, and never get the common soft tissue injuries you see so often in horse athletes. My Appy grew up on a 800 acre ranch and wasn't backed until he was five, and I was super lucky he was given that start. I think there is little coincidence that he was perfectly sound (except for being blind) and still doing all of the FEI work at 31 when I lost him. (And I firmly believe that was because the barn owner forced me out of a pasture into a stall/paddock.) You can see him below at age 26 warming up for a show to show I-1. He was completely blind at this time.
My GP horse is the baby you see in the pictures above running in the hills, and on the top right galloping down a steep, uneven, rock hard hillside. The other two top pictures are where she and her FEI sister and 25 year old mom live now, which is a steep walk, and lovely at certain times of year, and deep mud when we finally got rain this year. The herd pretty much every day did gallops around that muddy, uneven pasture, going in as much as a foot deep in places. The lameness issues were pretty much nonexistent in these horses compared to the horses in stalls.
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The older I get, the more I see just how important proper time and conditioning is for myself and horses. It takes TIME to get the body fit, whether it's growing, learning some new skill, or keeping it going. Growing bodies need proper stress of movement and activity in a variety of situations. That doesn't mean backing their still growing bones before four or pushing them quickly. They NEED to move and do everything, but the added weight of a rider and saddle and pulling/pushing them together is not one of them. Give a year or two of time at the beginning before backing, and give them many years of soundness on the end. But, they need to be out and moving, in pasture, handled, ponied, going to shows, and everything and anything else you can think of.
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Keeping the body healthy doesn't require a lot of fancy equipment, medicines, therapies, supplements, or whatever. It requires good hay, maybe a few supplements to balance the hay out, and ideally constant movement. I am 100% with Dr. David Ramey on this https://www.doctorramey.com/a-tale-of-two-horses-twice/ as well as staying barefoot. My Appy is the last horse I had shoes on because I didn't know any better, and by the time I learned, I couldn't just take them off. I had a great farrier friend who made me learn how to shoe, and when I bred my first horse, I left her and every other horse barefoot from then on, and always did them myself.
The chestnut below is the first horse I ever bred, borrowing a friend's TB who had produced some nice warmblood cross babies, and using the stallion Zorn, a Swedish warmblood I knew from my time at the horse college who was an international GP horse. She lived in pasture her whole life, never had shoes, and I got her to GP and finally pregnant to the #1 dressage stallion in the world at the time, and tragically lost her to one of those horrible situations you can do nothing about. (You can read about it in the link from the article on the main pages.
Mental health is not something everyone thinks about in horsekeeping. I know I didn't originally. I do know that I noticed once the horses were in a group situation where they could move around at will, they stopped needing that 20 minutes or so after getting on to get their attention and focus. Because they were out and interacting all day as they want, they didn't feel like they were