🧪 Signs of pain in horses are observable. Could AI systems enhance or replace human observations of horses experiencing pain? Revent research by Lencioni et al demonstrated that their system could classify between pain/no pain with overal accuracy of 88.3% journals.plos.org/plosone/arti...

The precision with which kick threats can be sent - and received - without injury is 👩‍🍳💋

🧪A field study looking at health issues of managed 🐴 found those housed in open barn groups showed fewer incidences of colic & lameness than stalled, solo🐴. While open barn 🐴 had ⬆️ incidence of open wounds, they were minor enough to not interfere with the 🐴’s work. scholar.google.ca/scholar?star...

Welcome to Trail Cam Tuesdays!

Camera ID: Conway
Location: Onaqui South Herd Area
January 2025

The Onaqui Catalogue uses carefully placed cameras to catch horses day or night, allowing us to see which horses are staying together even when we can’t access them.
#onaquicatalogue

🧪Test to determine the ‘tameness’ of 🐴s prior to transport could lead to a ⬇️ in transport-related disease & injury. Also, for non 🐴 folks, ‘unbroken’ 🐴 are more at risk than ‘broken’ ones. Because 🐴 people historically call the 🐴s we’ve trained ‘broke’🤷‍♀️ #quietpartoutloud
www.mdpi.com/2076-2615/11...

An opinion hill I am prepared to die on:

Orange is the only appropriate flavour for chewable vitamin C tablets.

🧪TL;DR Horses NEED social interactions to thrive. New research from Flamand et al showed that even one hour/day of free social interaction improved the behaviour of stalled horses: fewer stereotyped behaviour, less time in hypervigilance, more optimistic bias scholar.google.ca/scholar?as_y...

🧪 Despite what Hollywood says, blindfolding a horse to get them out of a burning building may take longer & require more lead rope pressure than not using one. But it may make it easier to help navigate a horse past visually 😱stimuli if training isn’t an option www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

🧪When not starting fights in the scientific community about correct pronunciation, vibrissae are much more than useless ’whiskers’ on a horse: sensory organs linked to specific 🧠 regions. Removing them compromises a horse’s ability to safely navigate their environment.

madbarn.ca/whisker-trim...

Being a person with deadly, incurable cancer who is nonetheless still alive for an indefinite timeframe gives me an interesting metaphor that helps me deal with things like large-scale corruption in government or commerce.

Bear with me for a second while I try to explain.

When horses do invisible skipping rope triple unders #nichepost

🧪Ooh, alert! Recent research looking at how a friendly (& long) maternal presence promotes maturation of brain territories involved in both social behaviour & physiological regulation IN HORSES, MY FRIENDS! Another paper to support rethinking premature weaning of 🐴. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

The horse, the myth, the Yellowmino legend: Calcite.

🧪Pain is an unpleasant experience, one from which horses are not exempt. Pain can cause horses to behave in ways people don’t like. Being able to recognize pain is a learnable skill. A new validated pain scale hopes to help with that.
www.frontiersin.org/journals/pai...

🧪Hot off the presses! A study by Torcivia and McDonnell showing a behavioural signature of gastric discomfort in horses: nuzzling, swatting, nipping and/or gazing at the abdomen, often associated with ingestion or anticipation thereof:
www.mdpi.com/2076-2615/15...

What a treat it was to sit down with applied ethologist & canine behaviour consultant Kim Brophey recently to record the latest episode of our pod. It was an edifying discussion about what our primary focus should be when assessing welfare of animals in training.
podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/n...

Screenshot of the moment the UFO tractor beam lifted my Calcite into the mothership. #horsebehaviour

Many ethograms for horses are photos showing specific behaviours. While great for some behaviours, such ethograms aren't great for conveying movement & context clues needed for classifying other behaviours. A new video ethogram aims to help with that: www.mdpi.com/2076-2615/14...