If you’re a dog or cat person, you may fantasize about horses—thinking they’re perfect and powerful, just pure energy and creatures of beauty. Well, they are energetic, beautiful, and powerful, but they sure aren’t perfect. Horses have as many behavior problems as people have. As many behavior problems as dogs, cats, and birds have.
One of the most frustrating of horse behavior problems is stereotypic behavior. Stereotypic behavior is an action repeated over and over—so, it’s an obsessive, compulsive activity. The most common horse stereotypic behaviors are:
· Weaving and
· Windsucking (also called cribbing)
Weaving
Weaving is like pacing, but horses only move the front two legs. With weaving, the horse stands in place and repeatedly rocks or steps moving one front leg then the other. Equine folks treat weaving by hanging rubber balls in the stall where the head or shoulders will whack into them as the horse leans right and left. Other folks use stall doors with a very narrow place for the head to poke from the door. This narrow opening means the horse must stand still in order to extend its neck and gaze outside the stall.
Windsucking or cribbing
A horse that windsucks grips a door or fence with its teeth and holds on while sucking in air. This maneuver expands the throat and some equine folks treat it by putting a non-expanding band around the horse’s neck. This behavior reminds me of kids that suck their thumbs and get an oral pleasure substitute for breast feeding.
Unnatural life leads to obsessive compulsive behavior
The sad truth is that most horses don’t have a natural life and aren’t free to interact in a herd or to graze for 12 hours a day. Instead, most horses are kept in stalls 23 of 24 hours. Equine folks don’t realize or don’t want to admit that this limited interaction with the environment drives the modern horse slightly nuts. Instead, equine folks commonly say that horses “learn” obsessive behaviors because they are under the bad influence of another horse that weaves or windsucks.
Study results
A study just published in Applied Animal Behavior Science examined whether horses do learn stereotypic behaviors from their neighbors. In the “Possible influence of neighbors on stereotypic behavior in horses,” published June of 2008, Danish researchers from the University Faculty of Science in Hungary (Krisztina Nagy1, Anikó Schrott, Péter Kabai) asked if horses learn to weave or windsuck because they observe other horses engaged in these activities. Researchers looked at almost 300 horses in 9 riding schools and concluded that stereotypic behavior increased when horses were stalled near others who engaged in these misbehaviors. This confirms what many horse folks say. Researchers also found that those horses who were most aggressive toward other horses were most likely to develop stereotypic behaviors.
Study findings may lead to more behavior problems
Unfortunately, this study, may lead to more isolation rather than less. If equine folks believe that their horses will begin weaving or wind sucking because they watch a horse with obsessive compulsive disease (OCD) do it, then barn managers may put horses with OCD in strict isolation. This is the worst possible solution.
Horses are pure energy
Horses, just as humans, dogs, cats, and all animals, should be free to interact with their environment most of the day. It’s not loving to stall horses in order to keep them safe or clean. Humans may be able to sit in cubicles and pretend it doesn’t make us crazy, but horses can’t pretend. Horses act. They are pure energy. And that’s one of the reasons we love them so much.
No comments:
Post a Comment