13. Equine behaviour and welfare Flashcards
NORMAL EQUINE BEHAVIOUR; eating, sleeping
- 60% grazing and foraging
- ~10, 000 paces per day just grazing
- Sleep for short durations multiple times in 24 hours
- “Prey animal” – strong flight response – “spooky”.
horse herd structure
- Stable social group (harem) of mares with a hierarchy, 1-2 stallions
- Bands of younger males
- Mares form close social bonds with 1-2 others in a lifetime (Feh, 2005)
what is the basic foundation for training horses?
Horses are sensitive to pressure and move away from it, which has laid the foundation for negative reinforcement training
horse industry welfare concerns
- Transportation and slaughter
> Slaughter ban in US has led to longer transport times for horses sent to Canada or
Mexico
> Shipping of live horses overseas for slaughter - Identifying and treating osteoarthritis
- PMSG
- Therapy horses
- Knowledge gap
- Horse Rescues
- Obesity
- Delay of euthanasia
- Doping
- Tight nosebands
- Fireworks
what sort of enrichment do horses need? what is not enough?
- Not just a stall ball!!
- Not increasing exercise!
- Foraging opportunity
- Social opportunity
common horse behavioural problems
Aggression:
* Towards people: fear, pain, learned behaviour
* Towards other horses: sex hormones, fear, territory, pain (esp breeding)
Fears and phobias:
* Vet, farrier, trailering….
* Separation anxiety?
Eating disorders:
* Wood chewing, pica, corprophagy – lack of roughage, exercise
* Anorexia – usually social, rule out dental disease
Stereotypical behaviours:
* Oral and locomotor
Learned helplessness:
* “stubborn”
- Self-mutilation, kicking, bucking, bolting, spooking, refusal…
what are stereotypic behaviours? what are types and what causes this?
= Repetitious, relatively unvaried behaviors that have no obvious purpose and interferes with the functioning of the animal.
- Displacement behaviour – normal behaviour displayed out of context (in a stressful or anxiety-producing situation).
- Confinement, lack of social contact, frustration, barren environments, lack of foraging opportunity, high concentrate diets, breed, use, early weaning.
- Can become emancipated from the environment – Compulsive Disorder
are stereotypic behaviours ‘transmissible’
no
what is cribbing? why is it a problem? how does diet affect it?
- Grip surface with teeth, flex neck and suck in air – increases intra-abdominal pressure
- 13%TB
- Wears teeth
- Temporohyoid osteoarthropathy
- Ulcers
- Weight loss
- Gas colic – surgical, poor recovery
- Grain spikes it, hay decreases it
treatment for cribbing
- Crib collars
- Electrifying surfaces and e-collars
- Bitter substances
- Rings
- Surgery
- Medication
=>but should we ‘treat’ cribbing?
using operant conditioning in horses: common strategies, pros and cons
Negative reinforcement:
* Traditional horse training
* Fine line > abuse > habituation/learned helplessness (“stubborn”)
* Timing is everything
Positive reinforcement
* Reinforcement in the eye of the beholder
* Most horses do not find, talking, petting, slapping as reinforcing
* Clicker training- timing of reinforcement
- R+ creates motivated and exploratory learners
- Often training a new or alternative behaviour to bypass a previously learned behaviour is easier than trying to fix a problem behaviour.
what is shaping?
Use positive reinforcement to shape behaviours
- Shaping is rewarding the components of a more complicated behaviour to build up to the full repertoire
what is cooperative care?
- Cooperative care is a method of training that allows the animal to participate in it’s own care and husbandry/medical procedures
- The animal has a sense of agency and control by being able to deliver and withdraw consent
