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Equine Neuroethology • Nutrition • Physical Therapies
🔬A science-driven, integrative approach to equine welfare.
✍🏻 Founder: Debora Cinganelli, MSc MRSB
Based in Italy • Working internationally

10/23/2026

A Brazilian team used an adapted Five Domains model, broken into 79 sub-domains, to assess welfare at three vaquejada and five gaited competitions. Stabling, forage, water and behaviour scored well. The weak spot lay in the health domain, in the checks around the competition itself: veterinary evaluation afterwards and inspection of tack. It is a small, exploratory study, but it shows what a practical event audit could look like.

10/13/2026

Forty-one one and two-year-old warmbloods wore collar sensors for 24 hours every month for a year, and a neural network turned the signals into eating, resting and active behaviour. On summer pasture they grazed for most of the day, walked about 10 km and rested in step with their groupmates. In winter group housing they ate around feeding times, walked 2 to 3 km in the paddock and were less synchronised. Housing and season were intertwined, and the sensor classification has its own error rate, so read it as a detailed portrait of a group rather than a verdict on any system.

10/09/2026

A Finnish crossover study published less than a month ago followed 16 stabled riding horses through two 21-day periods, once on 5 cm of peat bedding and once on 15 cm. On the deeper bed, horses spent about twice as long lying down during the night and lay down more often. Most of the difference was in sternal recumbency, and rolling was recorded more often as well. Swipe to read all the details

09/28/2026

Photo dump from last week's amazing course at Horses Inside Out with Dr. Sue Dyson.

Deep diving into static and dynamic assessment, subtle lameness, conformation vs posture, complex bilateral lameness cases, evaluating pain signals in-hand, on the lunge, and under saddle, how tack and rider interfere with horse biomechanics. So much to unpack.

What an interesting journey, I can't wait to integrate everything I learned into my practice!

09/25/2026

A survey of 1501 horse owners in the UK and Ireland grouped management styles by turn-out, forage access and company, then compared owner-reported health and behaviour problems across the groups.
Swipe through for what they found and how aligning to the 3Fs can help improve our horses welfare.

09/16/2026

Six facial regions. A three-point score for each. That is the Horse Grimace Scale, developed by Dalla Costa and colleagues at the University of Milan and published in 2014 as part of the EU-funded AWIN project.

It was built on forty stallions filmed before and after routine castration, with facial changes coded frame by frame against known pain states. The six scored items are ear position, orbital tightening, tension above the eye, strained chewing muscles, a strained mouth with pronounced chin, and strained, flattened nostrils.

The scale has since been validated for naturally occurring pain too, not just surgical pain, with a 2016 study confirming it holds up in horses with acute laminitis. It is not infallible everywhere. Evidence for some conditions, such as gastric ulcer syndrome, has been weaker, and researchers continue refining the tool, including a 2024 update to its anatomical descriptors.

Used properly, alongside behaviour and veterinary judgement, it gives a structured way to notice pain that might otherwise go unseen.

09/11/2026

No collarbone. No bony joint. The horse’s entire forelimb hangs from the trunk by muscle and fascia alone.

It is not a minor detail. With roughly 57 to 60% of bodyweight carried on the front end, this muscular suspension has to absorb shock and manage load on every single stride, without the mechanical advantage of a joint.

09/08/2026

There is more going on in a horse’s face than most people give it credit for. In 2015, Wathan and colleagues published EquiFACS, the first anatomically grounded system for coding equine facial movement, built on actual dissection work confirming which muscles are present and how they act. It documented a striking number of distinct facial actions, placing horses closer to chimpanzees than to most other domestic species in terms of facial complexity.

Here is the detail that gets lost online. EquiFACS does not interpret emotion or pain. It is a descriptive vocabulary, nothing more, nothing less.

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Post Falls, ID
83854

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http://linktr.ee/pathtobloom, https://pathtobloomitalia.substack.com/?r=7n2bxe&utm_campaign=pub-share-checklist, https:/

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