It's been recognized for decades that wild horse herds have a distinct hierarchy, typically with one dominant stallion that fathers all the offspring and one dominant mare that leads the herd to grazing ground. However, new research shows that there is actually a multilevel social structure to feral herds.
Drs. Tamao Maeda, Sakiho Ochi, Monamie Ringhofer, Sebastian Sosa, Cédric Sueur, Satoshi Hirata and Shinya Yamamoto used a drone to study 200 feral horses that lived in Serra D'Arga, Portugal. The study team took aerial images of the horses at 30-minute interval from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. for 30 days. They were able to identify more than 100 of the horses from the air using ground observation to determined color, markings and body shape.
The team then studied the patterns of interactions between the horses in the images to better understand their social structure. They concluded that there are multiple smaller social “units” within the larger herd. Each unit is comprised of two types of social groups: a harem of one or two adult males and several females and immature individuals; or an all-male unit of bachelors that could not attract any females.
The team discovered that these units all operate together to form a herd. In the herd the team studied, large mixed-sex units were typically at the center of the group of horses, with smaller mixed-sex and all-male units on the periphery. Their findings are consistent with the hierarchical strata of other social animals in which the more-dominant animals often occupy the center of the group, pushing subordinates to the periphery.
Read the full report here.
Read more at HorseTalk.
The post Like Humans, Dominant Horses Usually Found In Group’s Center appeared first on Horse Racing News | Paulick Report.
