How Horses Feel and Think: Understanding Behaviour, Emotions and Intelligence - Softcover

Wendt, Marlitt

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0857880004 ISBN 13: 9780857880000

Publisher: Cadmos Books, 2011

Synopsis

A fascinating journey into the equine emotional world

 

Offering a good basis for horse owners to learn to relate better to their horses, this book introduces readers to the language of horses, their astonishing mental capabilities, and their deepest emotions. There is background information and practical tools here for owners to develop a more harmonious relationship to their horses and to school their horses without using force but in a positive, pro-active way. Written in an accessible, sometimes light-hearted style from a practical point of view, it successfully bridges the gap between science and the daily experience of those who deal with horses.

About this title

About the Author

Marlitt Wendt is a biologist specializing in behavioral sciences and an adviser on behavior issues for equestrian centers. She works to promote a non-violent relationship between humans and horses by encouraging better understanding.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

How Horses Feel and Think

Understanding Behaviour, Emotions and Intelligence

By Marlitt Wendt, Thomas Ritter, Christiane Slawik

Cadmos Publishing Limited

Copyright © 2011 Cadmos Publishing Ltd, Richmond, UK
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-85788-000-0

CHAPTER 1

The Ethology and Evolution of the Horse

Before addressing individual equine learning and living experiences, I want to give an overview of the nature of the horse and the methods of behavioural biology. Horses behave more or less the same way today as their ancestors have always done, in the ways which have proved most useful in nature. Even domestication by man has not been able to change this. Ethology, the science of behaviour, can help us understand the horse's needs better and to participate in its experiential world. For this purpose we have to consider our means of influencing the horse, as well as its natural potential: Every horse is a unique individual, a product of its genetic heritage as well as its environment. Horses are born with certain behaviours, while others are acquired through life experiences. Behavioural science sums this construct up in the term 'nature and nurture', making it clear that both areas have a significant influence on the horse's personality.

What is Behaviour?

At first sight, the question might seem trivial – however, 'behaviour' is a central term and actually quite difficult to define, as it has many levels of interpretation. A grazing horse is exhibiting a behavioural pattern every bit as complex as a horse that is galloping, playing, or doing the piaffe. Such activities are always compounds of a variety of interacting mechanisms, and when evaluating a behaviour, all observable physical activities should be taken into consideration. Depending on the complexity of the behaviour, there may be an incredibly large number of physical features and changes. Take the example of the walk, for instance: how are the individual limbs moving, precisely? What is the rest of the body doing? Have you really considered every part of the body, all the muscles, and the surface of the skin? What breathing frequency can be observed? What is the expression of the eyes? In addition, we can describe the presumed purpose of the horse's actions. Where is it going? What does its facial expression say? Many interpretive elements are entering the equation here. It is the question 'Why?' that especially represents one of the central issues in behavioural science, and it can be answered on many very different levels.

Tinbergen's Questions

Nikolaas Tinbergen is considered one of the foremost behavioural scientists of the 20th century. Together with Konrad Lorenz and Karl von Frisch, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1973. Tinbergen developed the dominant theory of modern behavioural biology, which became known as '„Tinbergen's Questions', and which deals with the causes, functions, individual development, as well as the evolutionary development of behaviour. According to this elementary theory, there are four essentially equally important levels of answering any question we can ask about a horse's behaviour: causality, functionality, individual development and collective evolutionary development.

Let's take the example of a spooky horse, and answer Tinbergen's questions:

• The question of causality. You can initially answer this question on the level of the direct, immediate cause. A horse spooks because it has sensitive sensory organs that can send nervous impulses to the brain very quickly and lead to an immediate reaction.

• The question of functionality. Spooking gives our horse an acute survival advantage. It is able to react immediately to potential dangers and to protect its own life through flight.

• Spooking therefore fulfils a function that is necessary for survival in the horse's natural environment.

• The question of the individual development. Every horse will have observed the important ability to spook in its own individual developmental history, its life story, by observing its mother and other herd members, and will have learned this behaviour to an individually varying degree.

• The question of the collective evolutionary development. Spooking has furthermore proven to be an elementary behaviour in the horse's evolutionary development. For millions of years, the ancestors of our modern horses had to evade dangerous predators. Our modern horses are thus the direct descendants of extremely spooky quadrupeds that were able to ensure their survival as a species based on this behavioural structure. We should always keep this in the back of our mind when we complain about the excessive spookiness of our horses, or when we make fun of it.

Instincts in Horses

You could translate the term 'instinct' literally as 'natural urge'. An instinct refers to the inner, unknown impulses behind an animal's behaviour that an observer can witness. Colloquially, we call behaviour 'instinctive' when it happens spontaneously, 'from the gut', without conscious deliberation. For many years, behavioural science was based on what is called instinct theory: an instinctual movement was supposed to be the result of an animal's spontaneously arising inner readiness to act, which is triggered by a key stimulus once it reaches a specific stimulation threshold. In the widest sense, we understand instinctive behaviour to mean the horse's typical, innate behaviour. By today's scientific standards this view is outdated, as these simple basic assumptions cannot stand up to the new neurobiological explanatory models. A horse acts in much more complex ways and has to be considered a personality, not an 'instinct machine'. The assumption that horses always act according to a simple stimulusreaction principle neglects the fact that every behaviour consists of the interaction between emotional states, previous individual experiences, and conscious thought processes, as well as the individual, highly specific situation.

Ethology and Psychology Go Hand in Hand

Until the 1960s, only the 'nature' aspect of the 'nature and nurture' combination was considered relevant to classical horse researchers. They predominantly studied horses in their natural environment and presented their arguments mainly from the point of view of evolutionary history. It was only with the incorporation of the innovative approach of psychology, which focuses on the 'nurture' aspect by researching the development of individual behaviour and the learning processes, that a new dynamic entered equine ethology.

In modern behavioural biology these two explanatory models are now inseparably interwoven, in order to be able to grasp the horse's behavioural repertoire in its totality. Every sentient being's personality represents the sum of innate and learned elements, which interact constantly. For instance, the innate behaviour of a foal triggers a certain behavioural response from the mother, from which the foal in turn learns something which informs his future behaviour.

Modern equine researchers speak of a model of 'nature via nurture'. There are genetic traits that are switched on only after the individual has had the appropriate experiences. Both horses and humans, for example, are born with the ability to see, being equipped with eyes and the necessary nervous system. But if the exterior stimuli were missing, if we grew up in complete darkness, our vision would never develop. We would be functionally blind, although born with all the physical prerequisites for eyesight.

Modern equine research studies the inter action of innate and learned behaviours. This requires the statistical evaluation of as much comparable data as possible. An isolated observation by a horse-owner cannot produce a generalised statement about equine behaviour – no matter how interesting and unusual it may be. In today's ethology it is especially the traditional understanding of the herd and its hierarchy, the horse's ability to learn, as well as friendships in groups of horses, that are the centre of attention, because many traditional ideas about horses have long since been disproven in these areas, as we shall see throughout the book.

A Brief Excursion into Evolutionary Biology

When we think of the term 'evolution', we typically think of the science of genetic relationships between species. The various phenotypes of animal and plant species have evolved continuously over millions of years. Explaining, among other things, the relationship between the horse's behaviour and its environment, Charles Darwin's and Alfred Russell Wallace's theories on the origin of species are some of the most important aspects of evolutionary theory. Almost simultaneously, both proved impressively that the individuals of a population differ slightly from each other, and that small variations, a certain variability in the phenotype, are passed on to their descendants. Nowadays of course we know about the existence of genes as the carriers of inherited information. It is the genes that make the long evolutionary processes down to the horse, and indeed to us humans, unambiguously explicable.

Ever since the beginning of life on earth, more individuals were born of all species than their various habitats could support. Therefore, they had, and still have, to compete for the existing resources and the transmission of their own genes. Natural selection, i.e. the pressure that differing environmental circumstances impose on each individual, leads to a thinning of the population. Those who meet this selective pressure most successfully leave the most offspring behind, and transfer their genetic material into the future. A population changes over many generations in such a way that it retains only the traits of those individuals that were adapted best to their environment. In horses, their impressive speed and endurance can be seen as a selective advantage, because the slower specimens were more likely to fall victim topredators, and their genetic material disappeared for ever.

The sequence of the horse's ancestry, which is very well documented through extensive fossil finds, is considered the epitome of evolutionary theory. The horse has evolved, over a period of approximately 60 million years, from the forest-dwelling and rather antelope-like eohippus to merychippus (a herd animal that lived in the steppe 20 to 25 million years ago), to pliohippus, which was structurally very similar to the horse(6 to 12 million years ago), and to our modern equus caballus.

It was only during the last 5000 years that humans have exercised a substantial influence on the development of the horse. This process of keeping and breeding animals in captivity is called domestication. Humans selected specific traits among the original subspecies of the horse and bred different breeds, depending on the nature of the task for which they were used, or according to subjective ideas of beauty, by selectively breeding from particular parent animals, whose genes were then passed on to future generations.

CHAPTER 2

Development of Behaviour and Personality

In order to understand the personality of a horse, we first have to examine and understand the original aspects of its life that were not influenced by humans. Essential character traits are formed during the first days, weeks and months of its life. We should carefully consider at what time the contact between humans and the newborn foal should take place, and how intense it should be, so that the horse matures into a stable individual who trusts humans.

It is also paramount to look at the horse as a member of a community, since in nature horses live in herds – not exclusively, but in most cases. Herd life has various advantages. Many eyes will see more than one pair. Together, it is easier to fend off enemies, and every animal can benefit from the experience of the others in case of an emergency

As we shall see, equine group dynamics are far more complex, and more similar to the human understanding of roles than hitherto assumed. We can therefore look forward to new scientific discoveries. In the meantime, we should throw overboard the long outdated and overly simplistic explanatory models. Not everything in the horse's life revolves around rank and status, either. In nature relationships are constantly in flux.

Life Begins

Right after the birth, the mother is the first attachment figure for the newborn foal. This is where important switches are set for its future life. If the mother accepts the foal lovingly, it will have a more relaxed start in life than a foal that immediately has to experience the feeling of rejection. Thus, we do horses an invaluable favour by only breeding mares who are able to accept their foals and to care for them.

The first phase in the foal's life is the so-called 'imprinting' phase. Horses are precocial animals: foals are sufficiently developed at birth to be able to stand up, to run, and to follow their mother shortly afterwards. Since horses are born so well developed, one can notice distinct character traits within the first hours of life. For example, there is the little daredevil, and then there is the dreamer, who takes a little longer for everything. The first hours are very important for the bond between mother and foal. During this time, mothers generally keep other herd members away from their foal, because this is where an inextinguishable foundation for a close motherchild relationship is formed. The foal is imprinted on the mother during this phase. The mother (or any other large, moving object) becomes the object that the foal turns to, whose protection it seeks, and whom it follows. This is how the term 'follow imprinting' was coined, although foals are certainly not always found behind their mothers, but often run ahead. Equally, the mare will bond closely to her foal, take in its scent and explore its body intensely.

In order to familiarise the horse with humans, one can start with the first little training exercises during the so-called socialisation phase. During this phase a sentient being learns what is 'normal', what is considered 'proper behaviour', and what isn't. Foals are very open to new experiences during this period. Just like human children, baby horses learn on the one hand by experimenting and through trial and error, and on the other hand by imitating grown-ups. Horses form their first friendships during this phase of their life, they develop a sense of social relationships, and learn to pursue their own goals. If they have little or no contact with other horses during this important phase, they will have trouble reading them later on. Some horses struggle their entire life, because they had no other social contacts beside their mother during their first months. As a result, they can neither develop a sense for other personalities, nor mature into a secure character themselves.

This process is irreversible, which means that this time never returns once it has passed. This does not mean that the horse cannot learn good social behaviour later in life, but it will find it more difficult than during the phase that is designed for it by nature. A similar thing applies to children who are raised bilingually, as opposed to adults who are learning a foreign language. While children pick up a new language subconsciously, as a matter of course, without having to actively learn it, it is much more difficult to learn a new language later on, and requires much more self-motivation.

Weaning – A Common Trauma

In nature, a mother nurses her foal for almost an entire year, usually until just before the birth of the next foal, the following year. The foal gradually becomes more independent, takes longer 'trips', and returns less frequently to its mother. However, it stays in touch with its mother and its siblings, and does not complete its process of separation until a few years later. It thus matures slowly into an independent personality, not unlike humans do.

By contrast, the life of a typical foal in human care is different nowadays: after only about six months foals are separated abruptly from their mothers. From one day to the next they are left to their own devices and often have to switch to a completely different group of horses. Many foals find this highly stressful: the sickness rate among them is above average, and they develop the first behavioural issues, such as cribbing or weaving. It is especially detrimental if other areas of life are being changed also, for instance if there is a change in the stabling or paddock arrangements, or if the feed is changed from summer pasture to a winter feed.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from How Horses Feel and Think by Marlitt Wendt, Thomas Ritter, Christiane Slawik. Copyright © 2011 Cadmos Publishing Ltd, Richmond, UK. Excerpted by permission of Cadmos Publishing Limited.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Edition details

• Publisher: Cadmos Books
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 0857880004
• ISBN 13: 9780857880000
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 128