social | Horse Racing Free Tips

A horse that headbutts is often simply trying to connect with a human, but the action can also signal the horse's desire for control of a situation. Though headbutting can be harmless, horses are large and strong and headbutting can endanger human safety if carried too far.

Instead of pushing the horse away and saying “no,” a handler can offer the horse other behaviors that aren't dangerous to humans, suggests a recent report from The Horse. Dr. Andrew McLean of the Australian Equine Behaviour Center says a horse testing his limits with his handler is acquiring his “sense of agency.” Basically, he's trying to see what he can get away with.

If a horse is head-butting to show his bond with his handler, offering the horse a gentler option such as rubbing on an arm or shoulder is helpful. This allows the horse the social interaction he craves while keeping his handler safe.

A horse that is head-butting to control his environment is able to move the handler around — voluntarily or not. Pressure was applied, the human moved and the horse removed the pressure. An alternative is to offer the horse a vocal command, like “back” to move the horse instead. This response must be conditioned in advance, McLean says. A horse that performs a learned response retains the sense of control he gained when headbutting.

Learn more at The Horse.

The post Don’t Be Pushy: How To Redirect Your Horse’s Head-Butting Habit appeared first on Horse Racing News | Paulick Report.

Source of original post

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.