01/17/2023
Have you ever said " my horse is just cranky" or wonder how to fix those stall vices. This is a good ecucational read.
We promote emotional health in horses that is why we offer pasture as well as stall boarding with turn out.
Did you know that stabling increases stress and affects the horses immune system?
Are we underestimating the effects of domestic stress on the horses physiology!?
There has been a brilliant paper circulating that discussed the immune response to stressors, specifically changes in group composition versus relocation to individual stabling.
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0272445
But are people actually understanding the implications of this study and the bigger picture?
We often discuss the horses’ response to stress as one of fight or flight, but we often neglect to acknowledge that one of the main evolutionary coping mechanisms for the combat or escape from threat (stress) is living in social groups.
As the paper emphasises, social factors are potent in inducting stress responses, and in particular chronic stress, which is why they are known as social stressor. While people are focused on the point of individual stabling, the bigger picture is one of our lack of recognition of the horses natural socio-ecological environment and their emotional and cognitive needs. Wonderfully explained in this video I recently posted.
https://fb.watch/i6drFO8PzU/
Its not surprising therefore that one of the main welfare issues facing the horse is inappropriate turnout. Discussed in another previous post.
Stress initiates a sympathetic response and the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis, getting the body ready to fight or run. The problem is, if you live in a constantly stressful situation, this can lead to accumulative damage of the underlying stress systems, affecting resilience, leading to a wear and tear on the bodies physiological systems known as allostatic load.
Living in a sympathetic state, as well as affecting the horse systemically, has implications on default posture, in turn affecting pathological, accumulative, musculoskeletal load. This in turn initiates the posture-back pain and posture-hoof morphology cycles that are emerging through recent research. Expressed by the image below, and discussed in a previous post.
Allostatic load refers to the cumulative burden of chronic stress and life events. The cost of chronic exposure to fluctuating or heightened neural and neuroendocrine responses resulting from repeated or chronic environmental challenges that an individual reacts to as being particularly stressful (McEwen and Stellar 1993). Allostatic load then affects the immune system and has been shown to affect a long list of systemic and musculoskeletal diseases. This takes us back to the paper mentioned in the opening comments.
One of the things that lead to allostatic load is inability to shut off the stress response after a stressor is terminated, and studies have shown that given the opportunity, horses will use affiliative behaviors such as allogrooming (mutual grooming) with specific friends as a stress relief (Kieson et al. 2023). This is an important coping mechanism for the domestic horse! But as humans we then worry about agonistic behaviour and horses injuring eachother, more then the accumulative stress predisposing to obvious things like ulcers and less obvious things like every other possible musckuloskeletal injury!
Let alone the effects on mental state!
Even though studies have shown us the feasibility and relative safety of group housing for horses (Pierard et al. 2019) and agonistic interactions among horses of a stable group are very rare and subtle once a hierarchy has been established, in fact the horse spent more time relieving each others stress then arguing. Importantly the immune-modulations following relocation to single housing partly lasted for at least one week and were accompanied by occurrences of disturbed and stereotypy-related behavior patterns, so even if we are giving them “some turnout” the effects are possibly still accumulative!
Once again, this paper profoundly emphasises the importance of the series of webinars we are presenting on ethology and maintaining our social licence to operate.
https://fb.me/e/268ei1Kpk
This Sunday Dr Emily Kieson will be discussing Understandings in Horse-Horse and Horse-Human Relationships covering complimentary findings to this paper.
https://equineeducationhub.thinkific.com/courses/horse-and-human-relationship
