Welfare denotes the physiological and psychological well-being of animals. Physiological welfare includes freedom from disease and from excessive hunger, thirst, and stress. Intensive production methods may reduce the psychological well-being of the animal. Psychological welfare becomes an issue when there are obvious signs of suffering as a result of injury, pain, stress or boredom.
Horses are herd animals with strong social needs. You cannot keep a horse locked up alone in a stall all the time. Horses need companions so badly that some owners use ads to buy an animal to provide company to their horses. If horses have to be alone in their stalls, they should have a mirror in their respective stalls so they can see themselves. Preferably, they should have stalls that allow visual contact with the other horses in the stable. However, just being able to see other horses is not enough. This is a sort of mistake that many people make. Living in separate stalls is not like living together in a group because most horses installs cannot resort to allogrooming which is a kind of social grooming behaviour. Horses standing alongside each other, with each horse’s head next to the other horse’s butt mutually flick flies from each other’s faces. Cattle/buffaloes are never seen flicking flies off each other. By the way, allogrooming is an aspect of social behaviour, in which one individual grooms another. In addition to removing parasites, such grooming may serve to strengthen social relationships.
In which case it is often mutual. It may also serve an appeasement function, reducing tension between rivals. Another thing that may frustrate a horse is its confinement to a box stall with little opportunity for exercise. Possibly many aggression problems arise from frustration and rage because of being housed alone. Horses with a low-fear temperament should also get their rage system turned on if they are severely abused. Low-fear horses may be forced to obey you by hurting them physically, but such horses are going to have a lot of suppressed rage, and if you turn your back, they might harm you. A book about horse-training techniques describes several instances of a horse viciously attacking a person, especially about a horse tearing a man’s guts out. The only horse that is going to tear a person’s intestines out is a horse that must have been badly abused. NO one should teach an animal to hate humans.
Sociability and Domestication: A good social life for a horse is important for better training and riding. A comparison between young stallions housed alone and those housed in groups of three till age two showed that the horses housed in social groups were much easier to train, with less biting and kicking at the trainer. The horse’s sociability is what made it an animal that could be easily domesticated. Of 148 large mammals weighing over 50 kg that might have been domesticated, only 14 actually were domesticated. Of those 14, only five became important in most parts of the world: horses, cows, sheep, goats, and pigs. One of the main things that make a wild animal a candidate for domestication is that it should be highly sociable by nature. The big animals that were domesticated had one other quality in common, i.e., they lived in overlapping home ranges. Many herd animals watch and protect their territories, and some others have overlapping territories most of the year, but not during mating season.
The domesticated animals are peaceable creatures compared to those that humans did not domesticate. For example, the main reason zebras never got domesticated is that they are super high fear. Zebras may bite people and not let go. According to one report, they injure more people in zoos than tigers do.
The sociability of horses gives them a desire to please their human owners. When a horse has a good relationship with his rider, he has a built-in natural desire to cooperate and follow his rider’s lead. In the oldest manual on horsemanship, the author (Xenophon) suggests that the golden rule in dealing with a horse is never to approach him angrily. Anger is so devoid of forethought that it will often drive a man to do things which in a calmer mood he will regret. Thus, when a horse is shy of any object and refuses to approach it, you must teach him that there is nothing to be alarmed at, particularly if he is a plucky (courageous) animal; or failing that, touch the formidable object yourself, and then gently lead the horse up to it. On the other hand, forcing the frightened creature by blows only intensifies its fear, the horse mentally associates the pain he suffers at such a moment with the object of suspicion, which he naturally regards as its cause. Just to mention that a horse was afraid of black cowboy hats but not afraid of white cowboy hats.
Emotions Need Attention: The biggest challenge of horse welfare is preventing behaviour problems. Careful habituation is required for horses because they are flighty compared to dogs that perform jobs as police/army dogs or as guide dogs for the blind. Horse welfare depends on good training. If everyone could train and handle horses the way old-time horsemen do, only fewer horses would be put down (mostly in some western countries), sold, or neglected because of behaviour problems. One study of around three thousand non-racing horses in France found that more than 66 per cent died between the ages of two and seven years. Most of them were put down because of bad behaviour. Also, there are some situations where frustration, which is a mild form of rage, may cause behaviour problems. One study showed that horses worked for so many hours circling in a round pen that they got bored and frustrated. A person standing on the ground can easily see the first signs of fear before the horse tries to buck the saddle off. The trainer can end the session before the horse explodes. However, if a horse is forced to go around and around in the same circle for hours, the rage system may start to get activated, which must be avoided.
An expert trainer sees gradually escalating signs of fear and changes his training procedure before the horse explodes into rearing or bucking. A trainer was starting a young colt and teaching him to accept a rider on his back. The trainer ignored the colt’s tail switching, which got faster and faster until finally, the colt bucked the rider off. The colt’s fear had built up over fifteen minutes like a pot coming to a boil, and the session should have ended well before the colt reached his boiling point. The secret of expert horsemen is that they understand the behaviours associated with different emotional states and they have also figured out that a reward has to be given within one second after the desired behaviour occurs for the horse to make the association. Expert horse trainers understand the horse's emotions, instinctual natural behaviour patterns, and the principles of behavioural training.
In the wild horses survive by fleeing and kicking at predators such as wolves or lions that attack them. There are two basic behaviour types: cattle, buffaloes, sheep and goats which bunch together for safety, and horses and deer, which use flight for survival in brief bunchers and the flee-ers. In a grazing prey animal, vision is more important for survival in the wild than all the other senses, because rapid movement is a signal that danger is imminent.
It is important to remember that use the horse only for the purpose for which it has been raised and trained. Overusing the animal should be avoided since in the long run overusing the animal leads to a reduction in the overall useful and productive life of an animal. The quality and quantity of feed provided to a horse need to be regulated according to the workload. Protect the horses from severe cold and hot weather. Improper selection and use of a wrong bit can lead a horse to act up. The same is true about another tack. Saddle sores and lameness due to wrong shoes or a misplaced nail in a shoe need immediate attention (Excerpts: Khan et al. 2005; Grandin, 2008).
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