Equine Science Sundays: Recommended Reading

We love sharing equine science articles, and want to share some great articles that we have read lately as part of our Equine Science Sundays feature!

Today's article is by a research psychologist, Dr. Antonia Henderson, and she dives into why horses - who may have been performing well - may start to show conflict behaviours and reduced performance. Check out her blog for more behaviour-related reads!

Some snippets to get you interested:

• Research has shown that personality impacts how much pain is shown in horses with tissue damage, not the extent of actual tissue damage (Ijichi et al, 2014).

• 90% of horses referred to a veterinary behaviour lab had a physiological root cause.

• Single-housed horses are more likely to be depressed, have higher incidences of injuries, lameness, and health problems (Giupana et al, 2017; Popescu et al., 2019; Sanmartín Sánchez, et al. 2020).

• Horses are often turned out individually to ‘prevent herd-bound-ness’, but this worsens it. “The more secure a horse can feel that their buddies will reliably be there upon their return, the more confident that same horse can be to venture out alone”.

Read more here:

When Good Horses Say No.