Why horses make the best kind of friends

Researchers are taking an increasing interest in the bonds that form between horses and riders.

Many horse owners will read the latest findings and declare, “I didn’t need a scientist to tell me that”, but the application of scientific principles in exploring these relationships is important.

Humans have a tendency to anthropomorphise – to ascribe a human motivation to an animal’s action or response. This has no place in trying to ascertain just what is motivating a horse in its relationships with humans.

So what is modern-day science telling us about the horse-human relationship?

Researchers from Norway and North America have probed this relationship in detailed open-ended interviews with 60 riders from a wide variety of backgrounds.

They identified three central themes of what they called co-being – embodied moments of mutuality and engagement. It is, they say, a kind of anthropo-zoo-genetic practice, where species domesticate each other through being together.

Norwegian researcher Anita Maurstad, a professor in the Department of Cultural Sciences in Tromsø University Museum, explains that, in essence, both the horse and the human become attuned to each other’s physical and mental ways, thus developing the state of co-being.

Riders, she said, got to know their horses’ personalities through ongoing processes of deep engagement. Owners came to identify the different personalities, both generally and individually.

lungingMaurstad and her research colleagues from the University of South Dakota’s Department of Anthropology and Sociology found that riders did not simply see their horses as passive reflections of themselves. The relationship was much more complex.

Horses, she notes, lead their lives partly with humans, partly with other horses. Horses appeared to learn to relate to people in ways that provide them with good quality of life.

The findings will strike a chord with many owners, who cherish their relationships with horses.

But not all relationships will necessarily progress smoothly. Not all relationships are plain sailing.

Others researchers have found that horses can buckle under exactly the same kinds of stresses that affect humans: learning difficult new tasks, boring day-to-day routines, poor relationships, negative reinforcement, insufficient rewards, and troublesome bosses (trainers).

They can lead to frustration and neuroses, behavioral scientists suggest.

Professor Martine Hausberger and her fellow researchers in France note that horses, like people, are often asked to work on a daily basis, involving interpersonal interactions not only with other working horses but also with a “boss” – the human who manages or rides the animal.

“Work sessions are based on training, using more often negative reinforcement or punishment than positive reinforcement,” they noted.

Conflicts and tensions can easily arise.

Hausberger, who directs the Department of Ethology at the University of Rennes 1 in France, suggests negative experiences linked to training could lead to chronic states where horses “switch off”, becoming unresponsive and apathetic – states described in humans in cases of work-related burnout.

Abnormal repetitive behaviors in horses are thought to be a way for animals to cope with an unfavorable stress-inducing environment.

So what would seem to be areas of greatest stress?

An Austrian study confirms that starting a horse under saddle causes stress, which rises markedly during the first time a rider gets on the horse.

Researcher Alice Schmidt and others at the University of Veterinary Medicine, in Vienna, measured stress by examining the horses’ heartbeats and the levels of the stress hormone cortisol in their saliva.

Schmidt used three-year-old horses at the start of their training. Not surprisingly, she found the start of training was a stressful period.

Interestingly, when the horse and rider walked or trotted forward, the level of stress decreased somewhat.

“It seems as though the horse adapts rapidly to the idea of being ridden and that – as is the case for humans – exercise may help relieve stress,” she says.

arena12Fellow researcher Jörg Aurich cautions that a lack of care or an incorrect regime in early training could cause long-term damage to the relationship between a horse and its rider. It could prevent a sport horse reaching its full potential, as well as causing the animal unnecessary anxiety.

Schmidt has some reassuring words for trainers and riders concerned about stress levels in training.

“The stress caused by being ridden for the first time is nowhere near as much as that caused by being transported by road. And if you are gentle and careful when you start to train a young horse, it will soon get used to you.”

In France, researchers extended stress research to the role of temperament in training, in an experiment involving exposure to different levels of stress before a learning task.

Each animal was assessed beforehand for temperament based on fearfulness, group sociability, reactivity to humans, level of locomotor activity, and sensitivity to touch.

The study, led by Mathilde Valenchon and published in the open-access journal, PLoS ONE, found that temperament influenced learning performance, but only when the learning or re-learning performances were affected by stress, suggesting that temperament had little influence on learning ability provided lessons occurred in a stress-free environment.

They found that while direct exposure to a stressor tended to increase learning performance, the state of stress induced by the memory of a stressor during efforts to re-learn or reinforce the task impaired performance.

Valenchon, in another study, explored the effects of stressful situations on the working memory of horses, testing the ability of 30 Welsh pony mares to remember in which of two buckets they would find a carrot.

A researcher dropped a carrot in one of the buckets in sight of the mares. Each horse was made to wait between zero and 20 seconds before being allowed to the bucket to retrieve the carrot.

In a calm setting, the horses were found to have an average working memory of 16 seconds.

However, when the testing was performed under stressful conditions – involving the likes of a barking dog and a waving sheet – they performed much worse.

Researchers have also found that different disciplines induce different levels of stress in horses.

Findings from French research indicate that dressage and high-school work create higher levels of stress in horses than the likes of jumping, eventing and vaulting.

source by http://www.horsetalk.co.nz