Stabling horses is a human thing more than a horse thing; horses are obliging souls and will usually accept and adapt to less-than-ideal living situations, even if it negatively affects their health and their capacity to express normal behaviours.
Many training styles and riding mistakes can make a horse less responsive to cues, pressure, and even pain—and that’s often the early stages of learned helplessness. Learn how to identify and prevent this negative mental state.
When your horse is a bit slow coming in from the field, not as excited as normal, not interested in finishing their meal, you know something’s wrong. The first thing you can do is check your horse’s vital parameters, and checking a rectal temperature is something everyone can easily do.
US research on judges’ attitudes towards equine weight found that the proportion of respondents who said they would penalize a horse or pony for being too thin was significantly greater than the proportion who would give a similar penalty to an animal who was too fat.
A study out of the University of Guelph asserts that there is a non-invasive method to assess stress in horses, and it involves the smallest of movements: blinking.
Forage makes up between 50 and 90 percent or more of a horse’s diet. Much of the forage part of the diet comes in the form of hay. Because it’s such a big part of the ration, a good quality hay can help keep a horse healthy, while a poor quality hay can be detrimental.…
To evaluate the equine capacity to perceive the size of objects, researchers devised a study to test whether horses were susceptible to the Muller-Lyer Illusion, in which two identical lines appear to be of different lengths based on the orientation of arrowheads at their ends.
A company focused on helping keep horses safe and “sound” when it comes to stress, released a music track, called Equine Relax Trax, specially designed to help reduce stress in horses.
A computer has been successfully programmed in Brazil to automatically assess the pain level in horses based on video input. Researchers developed and evaluated a machine vision algorithm to assess pain levels in horses. The study team employed an automatic computational classifier based on the Horse Grimace Scale which was trained through a machine learning…
The use of horses in equine-assisted interventions appears to influence their perception of humans beyond work, researchers have found.