Sue McDonnell, PhD, Research Assistant Professor in Medicine and Reproduction, is the large animal behaviorist at New Bolton Center. Her work includes watching horses behave and misbehave. Among her study subjects at the moment are approximately 50 ponies pastured on some 32 acres at New Bolton Center. They reveal a glimpse of the day-to-day life of equids.

McDonnell has studied equids in the wild, and loves to do that whenever opportunities arise. But studies of wild horse populations are limited by environmental constraints such as wide range of herd movement through difficult terrain. Human presence can disturb ongoing natural behavior of wild populations. So, she has developed this semi-feral model herd of ponies on-site, just a short walk from her office and laboratory.

Semi-feral means that they are domestic stock, but have been turned out to organize and fend mostly on their own. They are provided preventive and emergency health care, and additional forage in winter. Interference by humans is deliberately kept to a minimum. Because they are domestic stock and are acclimated to people, they seem to be little disturbed by daily year-round observation and necessary handling. Their social organization and behavior reflect the equid social order–mares, stallions, and foals just doing what comes naturally. Comparison of the reproductive behavior of these ponies, and of other free-running or pasture breeding equids, with the normal and dysfunctional reproductive behavior of hand-bred horses has taught McDonnell many important lessons.

In the course of domesticating animals, the art of animal husbandry and selective breeding created a whole set of rules that are often quite different from nature. Breeders over the centuries developed methods for breeding horses with which the horses comply, for the most part. However, our methods of breeding are in many ways different from the behavior McDonnell is observing. She says, "The lessons I learned from watching horses at liberty imply simple changes from currently accepted or recommended breeding farm management practices, either for all horses, or for use when standard practices fail for certain individual animals. Implementation can save considerable time and effort, and in some cases can rescue the breeding career of individual animals