Study: Owners Might be Missing Equine Welfare Issues
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How’s your horse’s welfare? Does he look good? Are you sure? Go back and look again, a little longer and harder this time. French behavior researchers recently observed that many people are missing signs of poor welfare in their horses—or worse, they might even think those signs are normal.
“Humans are often not detecting welfare issues in their horses because they don’t know how to recognize them, or they’re not paying attention, or they don’t want to believe it; or, they have just gotten so used to seeing poor welfare that they’ve lowered their threshold of what they consider to be a suffering horse,” said Clémence Lesimple, PhD, researcher at the University of Rennes, in France.
In a recent study, Lesimple and Martine Hausberger, PhD, research director at the University of Rennes, investigated 373 riding horses of various breeds in 26 riding schools throughout France. The primary caretaker of each riding school completed a welfare questionnaire about each study horse in the facility. Lesimple and Hausberger then observed each horse for 18 hours (six hours, three days in a row) to check for signs of poor welfare—in particular, stereotypical or abnormal repetitive behavior (such as cribbing and weaving).
More than a third of the horses (37%) showed at least one kind of stereotypic behavior, and some of these exhibited as many as seven different behaviors, Lesimple said. However, caretakers had estimated that only 5% of the horses had any stereotypic behaviors and assumed that none of the horses had more than one
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