Veterinary medicine is undergoing an exciting development in all respects, from increased knowledge of diseases to improved diagnostic tests and advanced therapeutic possibilities. This development is also due to the increasingly important role of pets as life companions and the social benefits they provide. In the eyes of most people in Western countries, animals, especially pets, deserve excellent care, which is reflected in the increased willingness of owners to undertake complex and costly medical procedures for the health of their four-legged companions. A particularly relevant advance in veterinary medicine is the application of advanced diagnostic imaging modalities, originally developed for humans, to the assessment and diagnosis of pathologies affecting animals. The aim of this article is to present one aspect of this trend, that of horses and the improved diagnostic imaging modality of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) available to equine veterinarians for the characterisation of pathologies mainly affecting the locomotor and nervous systems of horses. At the end, clinical case examples are presented to illustrate the benefits of MRI and a selection of pathologies better recognised by MRI.