New evidence suggesting that horses produce more snorts in favorable situations could improve animal welfare practices, researchers say. | Photo: iStock

New evidence suggesting that horses reliably produce more snorts in favorable situations could help improve animal welfare practices, according to a recently published study by Mathilde Stomp, PhD, and colleagues from the Université de Rennes, in France.

Assessing positive emotions is important for improving animal welfare, but it has been challenging to identify reliable indicators. Physiological markers often give contradictory results, and many behavioral signals can be ambiguous. In particular, few studies have examined acoustic indicators of positive emotions.

Anecdotal reports have indicated that horses frequently produce snorts in positive situations. So Stomp and colleagues evaluated how frequently 48 horses—which lived either in restricted conditions (i.e., riding school horses that spent much of their time in individual stalls) or naturalistic conditions (i.e., stable groups of horses always in pasture)—snorted