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:
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