Equine Behaviour in Mind: Applying Behavioural Science to the Way we Keep, Work and Care for Horses

Suzanne Rogers

• Publisher: 5m Books
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781789180428
• Topic: Medicina
• Subtopic: Ciencias veterinarias equinas

Intended for people who work with horses and for owners who want to learn more, Equine Behaviour in Mind provides ideas for practical ways that changes can be incorporated into daily interactions with horses.This book advocates a mindful approach to working with horses, encouraging the reader to think in a horse-centric way. Academic behavioural research is used to underpin understanding of horse behaviour and changes that can be made to positively improve horses' lives. The aim is to provide both the theory behind behaviour-minded horse management and the practical application to enable impactful changes to be made. Real world examples and case studies are provided to highlight these points.Horse behaviour is discussed in a range of contexts, including breeding, training and competing. A behaviourally minded approach to teaching riding, to medical and dental check-ups, to rehabilitation and rescue, and to driving change for horse welfare in both developed and developing countries is also covered.Equine Behaviour in Mind will enable readers to think critically in an objective way about how they manage and work with their horses.

Chapter 1
Management

Suzanne Rogers

Building on from the Introduction, this chapter will explore how well the behavioural needs of horses are met in typical management situations. Case studies will illustrate how we can address potential shortcomings even with limited resources or in constrained situations. Substantial focus will be given to the effect of feeding and environment on behaviour. Let’s meet Swayze… Compared with Swayze’s day, some horses receive no turnout at all, some more, some are ridden on trail rides (hacks), some just around the school, and so on but the story is common for horses across the world. What are the effects of such confinement? How can we provide more opportunity for natural behaviours, given the constraints many owners are under? And what other options are there for behaviourally minded management? This chapter will explore all these things and we meet some pretty inspirational people along the way.

Swayze’s day

Swayze is a 15-hh grey cob with a thin, wispy mane and a little moustache. He is owned by Rosa, a 25-year-old office worker who keeps him on part livery at a yard of 25 horses. Twenty-four hours in his life goes something like this. At 8 a.m. one of the stable girls arrives and feeds all the horses their breakfast – this comprises typical concentrate feed in a bucket. Swayze eats his food in eight minutes and then waits. At 10 a.m. he is turned out into a paddock, which used to be one large field for the herd of horses but has since been split up using electric fencing into small paddocks, about the size of four stables each. He is alone and next to a different horse each day so doesn’t feel comfortable enough with his neighbours to play or mutually groom. There is very little grass, no shelter and no browsing so he stands around in the paddock for two hours until he is brought back into the stable. He isn’t turned out longer as there is a rota for turnout and it is another horse’s turn. At 1 p.m. he is given his “lunch”, a haynet, which takes him about 20 minutes to eat. Then he stands in his stable until 5.30 p.m. when his owner visits after work. During that time, he is skipped out for five minutes, the yard cat visits his stable for three minutes and he has two short bouts of sleep of 20 minutes each. At 5.30 p.m. he is taken out of his stable, groomed, ridden in the arena for 40 minutes and then returned to the stable at around 6.45 p.m. He is given a second concentrated feed and a haynet. By 7.45 p.m., if not before, he has eaten all his food and stands around for nearly 12 hours until his day starts again at 8 a.m. He sleeps for around three hours in the night and at dawn, split up into short bursts. This is his life, day in day out.

The “other” 23 hours

People often ask me for my opinion on the effectiveness or kindness of different horse training methods. I do have an opinion but for me, when considering a client’s horse’s well-being I am concerned with their whole life. A typical amount of daily training is probably between one and two hours a day for most days – leaving a whopping 22 or 23 hours in a day, and only approximately four of those will be sleeping, and not all at once. Therefore, if we can ensure the horse’s needs are met outside the training, we can minimise the impact of less than ideal training situations.

Let’s consider the typical stable yard. Traditional yards in the UK consist of rows of stables, often in a “U” shape, with the horses stabled individually and turned out into fields in groups. In other parts of Europe, it is more common for horses to have access to the outside in the form of rows of stables with pens extending to the outside to provide an area the horse can freely access. These pens are usually individual extensions of the stables but sometimes more than one stable accesses the same yard area. In North America, but increasingly in the UK also, the barn system is more common, with individual stables within a large barn. Some cultures routinely tether horses as standard management practice.

Horses are confined in stables for wildly varying amounts of time but usually have access to a field at some point and this might be individual turnout or in groups. A change of scenery for a horse is usually a good thing, especially if given the opportunity to graze and browse (eat bushes and trees) but being out in an exposed field without shelter or appropriate provisions is not necessarily any better than being confined in a stable. Later in this chapter we explore many ideas for enrichment of outdoor environments as well as stables.

Horses are social animals; when living in groups, they spend all their time in visual distance of their herd-mates and most of the time they are able to see, hear, smell and touch other horses. Some time is spent playing, grooming or standing head to tail for mutual fly control. Horses need to express normal behaviours, which includes running and exercising, impossible in a stable.

Horses living in stables, especially ones that are inside and on yards that are very quiet, means that literally nothing much at all happens for hours and hours on end. The environment is devoid of any stimulation, things of interest, even of different smells and noises. From this impoverished environment, sometimes 22 hours a day or more, we expect to turn up at the yard, groom, tack up and ride our horses and for them to be absolutely compliant in doing so. Imagine being cooped up and then suddenly your world opening up as you go on a hack! That is so much to expect from our horses – when we keep them confined, their worlds become small and new experiences seem difficult to cope with due to the sudden overstimulation.

Given the increased urbanisation of many previously rural areas, idyllic equestrian properties are becoming hard to find. However, there is always something we can do to improve the lives of the animals in our care and to strive to meet their needs even within the constraints of modern horse ownership.

Meeting social needs

Being around other horses is key to survival and housing horses individually, especially when they cannot easily see or touch other horses, is chronically stressful for them (Yarnell et al., 2015). Studies in pigs have shown that when deprived of food and social interaction, pigs chose social interaction over food. To my knowledge, no such formal experiment has been done with horses, but some horses are making these choices when available in yards and are labelled fussy eaters. Eating and drinking are social behaviours for horses. Stabled horses sometimes take hay from their haynet, which might be in the back of their stable, and walk to the front to eat it looking over the door where they can see other horses. This could be for several reasons, including a need to see what is happening outside if they do not feel safe eating alone, but in many cases is likely to be rooted in the desire for social eating.

Group housing can help to meet the need for social interaction if confinement is considered vital. Horses can be kept in small groups loose inside a barn or in a sheltered area with hardstanding. The size is important and must provide enough space for horses to move away from each other without getting cornered. Interestingly, keeping horses this way has been found to reduce the time it takes to muck out compared with horses kept in individual stables.

Social housing works best if the food and water points are not placed in the corners of the area – because eating and drinking are both social activities. Having to take turns because a drinking trough is only accessible by one horse at a time can be stressful and cause negative interactions between members of a herd. It is important to introduce horses in a large area first before decreasing the area available. Many horses have not developed social skills that enable them to live in small spaces with other horses, so a gradual introduction plan is vital, ensuring that resources are plentiful.

One of my clients kept her horse on a yard where the stables were in a barn which was divided into many “stables” using relatively low, concrete walls. At first, the design could be considered appealing due to the fact the horses could see, touch and smell other horses on three out of four of the sides of their stable. However, upon observation, it was clear that this was actually making the horses very anxious – perhaps partly due to being able to see a large area but not have access to it but also because of the interactions between the horses. One of the horses was frequently lying down, which the owners read as a sign of contentment with the environment given that, as prey animals, lying down is a vulnerable position. However, in this case it seemed that the horse was lying down as it was the only way he could remove himself from contact with other horses on three sides of the stable. This is a good example of where an owner was trying to think from the horse’s perspective but lacked the observational skills to be able to assess the horse’s likely emotional state.

Designing stables with “windows” between them enables horses to touch and smell each other but the windows should be relatively small so that the horses have their own space to retreat to in case of any negative interactions. If the stables are small and the horses have not learnt appropriate social behaviours, it might be very stressful for a horse to have such contact.

An innovative approach to social housing is the use of wall systems – walls that stand independently and are moveable, placed in the middle of social housing (to avoid creating corners where horses could get trapped) to provide visual breaks from other horses when needed.

For horses stabled with no tactile access to other horses, a “visit” from a friend can be a welcome activity. Consider leading another horse or pony outside your horse’s stable so that they can interact. If they know each other well then supervised time with the visitor horse tied up outside the stable might provide positive experiences for both. The choice of visitor is important, ideally it should be horses who are >turned out together and who are known friends. If wanting to introduce horses that can visit each other safely, they should be introduced using a standard introduction programme before being placed in close proximity to each other.

Photo: Jenni Nellist

Exploring the use of stable mirrors

There is a growing trend to use stable mirrors as a form of enrichment, ostensibly for the horse to see “another horse”. This concept needs to be explored. First, it is unlikely that the horse really interprets the mirror image of himself as being another horse – the “other” horse will lack the smell, sounds and behaviour a real horse would have. Even if the horse did interpret the horse to be another horse, that might not be a positive thing if the horse was exhibiting signs of stress or anxiety – perceiving a stressed horse in the same environment is unlikely to be a positive outcome for the real horse. There is the possibility that the horse will recognise the horse in the mirror as him/herself. Until the last decade or so it was thought that only humans have the capacity to recognise themselves in mirrors. In 1970, a scientist called Gordon Gallup Jr devised a methodology to test whether a non-human animal has the ability for self-recognition. Scientists first introduce an animal to a mirror and observe their behaviour. Then they place a visual mark on the animal’s body (e.g. scentless paint), introduce the mirror again and observe any differences in behaviour compared with the times the animal was in front of the mirror without the mark. Animals that pass the test and are thought to understand that the animal in the mirror is themselves, adjust their bodies to get a better look at the mark using the mirror and might touch it (on their body, not in the mirror). So far, only a few species have passed the test, not including horses. However, the test is criticised for producing false negative results for many reasons – for example, typically low numbers of animals are tested and the individual tested might not be representative of their species, and if kept in an impoverished environment they might lack the curiosity they would otherwise exhibit. With the current scientific knowledge, it seems that horses do not recognise their reflection as themselves, but this requires further investigation. Ultimately, however, we still don’t know if horses consider the horse in the mirror to be another horse, themselves, a representation of a horse, something else entirely or if the perception varies between individuals.

The research appears to be inconclusive regarding the results of the use of stable mirrors; some studies suggest that they help to decrease stereotypical behaviour (McAfee et al., 2002; Mills and Davenport, 2002). To introduce a mirror, it is best to first test your horse’s reaction to the mirror in a larger space than the stable – or in the stable but so that he has the option to freely enter and leave. The general advice is that the mirror should be placed in the stable so that the horse can choose whether to look at his/her reflection or not. However, this possibly fails to take into account the nearly 360-degree vision of equines.

The initial response of horses faced with a mirror varies significantly. Some horses approach it and extend their noses in a typical “social greeting” behaviour, some even make vocalisations directed at the mirror and some horses make aggressive threats to their reflection (possibly more likely in undersocialised animals). Studies, and general observations have shown that many horses are cautious when they first see the mirror but that they “accept” the mirror and benefit from the reflection after a couple of weeks. This is interesting as has the horse learnt in that time that the reflection is not a horse, or are they considering the reflection to be a horse?

Movement

Free-ranging horses continually travel to find food and water. It is estimated that horses roam for around 32 km a day given the opportunity and, interestingly, the number of steps taken is similar in large and small areas. The physiology of the horse is set up for this – horses have relatively small hearts for their body size so movement aids blood flow around the body. When stabled, however, the circulatory system is not able to work this way and the heart does not work optimally.

Movement is also needed for optimal functioning of the skeletal system, especially in development, as it stimulates growth in bone density. And movement over natural terrain stimulates the hooves to grow and be worn down appropriately. Dr Robert Bowker, an equine hoof researcher, showed that horses who were stalled 24/7 only took 800 steps per day compared with horses living in fields, who took 8,000–10,000 steps per day (unpublished). Interestingly, he found that even stabling horses just at night resulted in less movement during the day even if given the opportunity.

Although horses tend to have more freedom in a field or paddock than in a stable, the growing trend to split fields into many sections to provide horses with individual turnout, sometimes not much bigger than a stable, is of great concern. The size of the home range for free-ranging horses varies according to the resources available on the land but is estimated to be up to 78 km² (Mills and McDonnell, 2005). When we keep horses in small fields and deny them the opportunity to home range it is our responsibility to meet their behavioural needs in other ways.

Another welfare concern is that horses do not like to graze around faeces, either their own or that of other members of the herd. When kept in small fields, horses usually develop the habit of eliminating in one or two places (termed latrines) and as these are not grazed it means the grass is taller in the toilet patch. Free-ranging horses do not develop latrines unless their home range is small (Lamoot et al., 2004). For good management in establishments where grazing areas are small, the faeces should be picked up so that the horses have a larger ar...