Understanding Your Horse

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Understanding Your Horse
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• Why does he do that?
• Evolution of the horse
• Horse dates back around 65 million years
• Humans around 4 million years.

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• The starting point!
• A dog sized animal 4-11kg
• 4 toes
• Eyes forward faced
• Unspecialised molars probably a fruitivore
• Lived in forest and swamp habitat

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• Survival of the fittest
• This refers to the survival of individuals best
  adapted to their environment or best adapted to
  the environment that they live in.
• Selection pressure the driving force behind
  evolution through natural selection.
• The decrease in forest and swamps due to climate
  change i.e. increase in global temperature
  drying out resulted in more grazing land

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• They had to move to the open plain where they
  would be in full view of predators, where fruit
  and fleshy leaves were rare.
• Horse was in view of predators all the time and
  therefore has evolved to deal with predators to
  survive
• Fast moving to survive

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• The horse still thinks this way

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Behaviour and natural selection

• Differences in behaviour
• Spooky
• Dopey

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• The more alert horse
• better mother
• longer life
• more offspring

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• Dopey - less chance of survival.

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• Behaviour is adaptive.
• Natural behaviour that you see, helps survival
  and reproduction
• The horse has evolved for an environment that he
  cannot hide ie the open plains, constantly
  looking for danger and very aware of other
  animals.

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Equine Adaptions

• If the horse cannot flee it fights
• Fight or flight
• Social animal living in a group
• Relies on herdmates for survival lookouts.
• They do not like being alone
• Communication is a requirement for living in a
  group and so is predictability.

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The Domestication of the Horse

• Thought to have been domesticated about 4000BC
  through evidence of a bit on the lower jaw.
• One of the last animal to be domesticated

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• We breed the horse for what we want
• Size
• Speed
• Behaviour

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Has the Horses Behaviour Changed?

• We tend to breed for appearance and performance
  rather than behaviour and the ability to cope
  with the human made environment.
• The psychology of todays horse is similar to
  that of the first horse.

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Behaviour problems and Abnormal Behaviour

• Definition of Behaviour Problem
• A behaviour pattern that gives the horse manager
  a problem

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• Behaviour problem is a very loose term depending
  on the people involved.
• Definition of Abnormality
• A behaviour that causes harm to the animal or
  other animals

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• Abnormality is only shown by a few animals
  10-20 in the population.
• Self mutilation or self harm
• Human perception a behaviour that is not normal
  is bad.eg withdrawal, self-mutilation,
  stereotipy.

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• Damage to other individual
• Aggression is not an abnormality, protecting the
  foal.
• Sometimes what we think may be abnormal is, in
  fact, normal

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Consequences of Abormality

• Surgery to prevent crib biting and wind sucking
• Recent research is identifying that crib biting
  stimulates saliva production to combat acid in
  the stomach.
• Stallion ring causes pain to the animal, not
  used as much today as the stallion will not be
  interested in breeding.

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Definition of Normal

• Decide what is normal and what is not.
• If you do not see a behaviour it does not mean it
  is not there. Eg. A horse in a loose box cannot
  graze.
• Put the horse in an environment where you can
  observe the behaviour.

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Vices

• Used to describe many behaviour problems
• Vice a bad habit
• This implies that horses have a bad habit
  therefore it is the horses fault
• Not an appropriate term

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Sterotypies

• A repeated, relatively invariant sequence of
  actions that have no obvious benefit to the
  horse.
• Never been recorded in wild horses

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• Individuals may also develop their own unique
  stereotipies
• Can be over or under stimulated
• When you see the sterotippy developing, you have
  a problem, therefore you need to change the
  environment.

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Treatment of stereotypies

• Crib collars and various operations cause pain
• Stop the problem temporarily, starts again when
  collar taken off.
• Could it be that we are stopping them from coping
  with their environment?
• Stopping the stereotypy can cause another
  reaction that could cause more harm.

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• The only way to get rid of the stereotypy is to
  change the environment.

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Self mutilation

• Stallions that are more isolated.
• In the worse cases sedation is required

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Aggression

• Different types of aggression
• Mobile aggression the horse rushes to get you
• As a result of thwarting of motivation
• Frustration causes aggression
• dominance hierarchy

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• Horse hierarchy is complicated and always
  changing
• Current (human) thinking to teach the horse who
  is boss
• A situation were they will challenge you because
  the hierarchy is changing causes a lot of
  aggression.
• Dominance notion may be responsible for a lot of
  unnecessary human aggression towards horses.

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Wood chewing

• Not uncommon in the wild minerals?
• Can be dangerous splinters
• Lack of roughage in the diet boredom
• Horses do eat living wood in the wild as a food
  source for them
• New Forest ponies eat branches.

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Eating bedding

• Straw is a food source
• Horse cannot categorise between food (hay) and
  bed (straw)
• If there is not enough forage (hay) they will eat
  their bed

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• Our behaviour affects their behaviour
• The only problem horses have is humans!