EP 34: A Horse's Life - The Neuroscience of Equine Welfare

And I'd love to start out with the first question of, um, and this is for Mark and Chrissy, and I'll let you determine.

You can raise your hand if you wanna go first.

But how do you, how do you determine if a horse is very calm and confident and sure in their job, where they're looking externally mellow, relaxed, and just solid and stoic versus a horse that is maybe shut down or frozen or in a state where they're really not in their body and they're almost dissociative? What are the things that you look for in those states, like when they're in those states? What are you seeing the differences?

There's a couple of things that I, I kinda look for.

Uh, one of them is, how does the horse do when they are out of a familiar place? So if the horse is at home doing a job they're familiar with, and they are able to do the job fairly well, and then you take them someplace else that they're, where they're in an unfamiliar situation, and it's as if they, nothing is familiar to them.

Maybe they, they were really responsive or appeared really responsive in the familiar place, and then you get them into an unfamiliar place, and they have trouble responding to just about anything.

That can be kind of a red flag for me.

Usually that, that, that might tell me that the horse maybe was going through the motions in the familiar place, that once they get into an unfamiliar situation, they start getting overwhelmed.

That can tell me that maybe they, they didn't really understand what they were doing when they were in the familiar place.

They were doing it probably just through sheer repetition in the familiar place.

But once they got out of the familiar place, familiarity went away, and they don't have a foundation to rely on to be able to...

In other words, they don't really know the job that they were being asked to do.

They were just sort of doing it through rote behavior, and then once they get into the unfamiliar place, that comes undone.

It k- kinda comes unraveled.

Is that a, a shut down horse? Is that a horse that's frozen? It's one of those things where it could be where the horse is just going through the motions in the familiar place.

But it does tell me that the horse probably didn't understand what was being asked when they were in the familiar place.

They, they had just sort of developed a routine that got them through the day, and that happens with a lot of horses.

Trail horses that, horses that have been on the trail for, we've seen them where they were on the trail for 20 years, and you put them in an arena, and they don't know how to function.

But they're great trail horses.

Show horses that people want to turn into trail horses that they have trouble with, and, and the list goes on.

So, so that would be, I'd probably just kinda throw that out there as something to think about.

Yeah.

That's interesting.

So by taking them into a new envi- environment, it really gives you a better picture of what's going on.

Are they just automatic and going through the motions, or are they doing their job and now they can take that job and transfer it to this new place? Interesting.