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Understanding Your Horse

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Natural behaviour that you see, helps survival and reproduction The horse has evolved for an environment that he cannot hide ie the open plains, ... – PowerPoint PPT presentation

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Title: Understanding Your Horse


1
Understanding Your Horse
2
  • Why does he do that?
  • Evolution of the horse
  • Horse dates back around 65 million years
  • Humans around 4 million years.

3
  • 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

4
  • 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

5
  • 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

6
  • The horse still thinks this way

7
Behaviour and natural selection
  • Differences in behaviour
  • Spooky
  • Dopey

8
  • The more alert horse
  • better mother
  • longer life
  • more offspring

9
  • Dopey - less chance of survival.

10
  • 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.

11
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.

12
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

13
  • We breed the horse for what we want
  • Size
  • Speed
  • Behaviour

14
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.

15
Behaviour problems and Abnormal Behaviour
  • Definition of Behaviour Problem
  • A behaviour pattern that gives the horse manager
    a problem

16
  • 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

17
  • 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.

18
  • Damage to other individual
  • Aggression is not an abnormality, protecting the
    foal.
  • Sometimes what we think may be abnormal is, in
    fact, normal

19
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.

20
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.

21
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

22
Sterotypies
  • A repeated, relatively invariant sequence of
    actions that have no obvious benefit to the
    horse.
  • Never been recorded in wild horses

23
  • 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.

24
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.

25
  • The only way to get rid of the stereotypy is to
    change the environment.

26
Self mutilation
  • Stallions that are more isolated.
  • In the worse cases sedation is required

27
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

28
  • 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.

29
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.

30
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

31
  • Our behaviour affects their behaviour
  • The only problem horses have is humans!
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