Communicating With Horses
Heather Smith Thomas
April 12, 2006
To work with horses successfully, we must be able to communicate adequately with voice, touch, and body language.
To work with horses successfully, we must be able to communicate adequately with voice, touch, and body language.
Always think in terms of safety first when handling horses — safety for you, the horse, and anyone else in the general area. Like it or not, horses are fight or flight creatures and can be unpredictable when faced with new people or surroundings.
I am looking into ways to settle down a colt that is showing full-blown sexual interest already at a 1 1/2 years of age. He’s just too much for us to handle, but we are not ready to geld him. If you try to correct him when he’s all excited, he
Whether on a pack trip into the mountains or on a weekend trail ride during which you return to your trailer at night, it is important that your trail horse has been taught to stand quietly when tied, hobbled, or tethered by one foot to a picket pin.
I have a client with a foal that was weaned a few days ago, and it has started cribbing. Within only a few hours after it was separated from the mare, it was seen doing something funny that the owners now appreciate was cribbing. Once they
Therapeutic riding is for people of all ages with various disabilities, and it has become very popular. For horses, however, the invitation is much more re-stricted. There are specialized expectations of a horse used in therapeutic riding. If
Throughout their existence, horses have been prey animals. Predators have been pursuing and feasting on them for eons, and they continue doing so today, despite the fact that domestication of the horse and the spread of civilization in general
We often punish horses for exhibiting undesirable stereotypic behaviors, but most of these behaviors are responses to suboptimal environments. Thus, punishing the horse for the behavior only increases the already heightened stress that caused
When your horse’s behavior changes, you wonder what caused the change–did he start kicking his stall because he is in pain, or just because he hates his new stablemate? Behavior changes can stem from physical problems, psychological ones, or a
“Until recently, horses have been estimated to have average intelligence at best,” said Evelyn B. Hanggi, MS, PhD, president and, along with Jerry Ingersoll, co-founder of the Equine Research Foundation (ERF) in Aptos, Calif., during her review
While horse owners worldwide want a simple answer to the question of whether foal imprinting works or not, it’s hard to give a simple answer to what really isn’t a simple question. This was the message of an imprinting research review presented
A stallion handler must be able to focus the stallion’s mind on him, as well as the mare, and make him wait for instructions. This cannot be achieved through fear or abusiveness, but through training basic cues and maneuvers to the stallion before he
My 11-year-old daughter is having trouble with her pony nipping at her when she is girthing him, and when she goes to mount without an assistant. He also smacks his tail and pins his ears, almost looking like he might cow-kick at her sometimes.
It comes as no surprise that a Swiss study of kick injuries to veterinarians found that the risk of injury to veterinarians treating horses is highest when performing painful procedures on the horse. In the study, Sabina Jaeggin, assistant at th
I’m studying for an MSc in Equine Science and am researching equine behavior. Having studied scientific literature, including your catalog of horse behavior (The Equid Ethogram, A Practical Field Guide to Horse Behavior), I cannot find any
An English researcher wants to provide a reliable and accurate way of identifying the personality of individual horses. Adele Lloyd, MSc, a Moulton College research associate based in Northampton (Central England), wants to study whether a horse
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