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British Charity Rehomes Horses In An Innovative Way; Less Stress For Equines

The COVID-19 pandemic has altered life for many horse owners in Britain, forcing them to relinquish their animals as financial resources to care for them dwindle. Many rescues and adoption centers that assist horses in Britain are full, but they are preparing for an even more difficult winter as job losses continue and finances become tighter.

Blue Cross for Pets is a rehoming organization that helps horses, cats, dogs and other small pets in England, Wales and Scotland. The organization also has animal clinics and hospitals that assist sick and injured pets when their owners are struggling to afford the veterinary fees.

Blue Cross has created a “Home Direct” service to place horses into new homes straight from their current situation, eliminating the need for the horse to be moved more than once. This resource also takes the pressure off charities that may already be struggling and allows them to focus on welfare emergencies.

Blue Cross staff thoroughly assess each horse and then place it on the charity's website to find a new owner. Once a new potential owner is located, Blue Cross arranges and oversees the initial visit and introduction process. If the match is a good one, the horse is taken from its old home directly to its new home, reducing stress on the horse as it acclimates to one new environment instead of two. In each step of the process, the horse is treated as if it were living at a Blue Cross center.

Since its launch in 2015, Blue Cross Home Direct has helped 87 horses. Any horse can be a candidate for Home Direct if it passes a health check and is not on any long-term medications. The goal of Home Direct is to assist horses by finding them new homes while they are still healthy, instead of waiting to offer help when they are potentially in a welfare crisis.

Thus far in 2020, the United States has reported record numbers of equine adoptions, but equine rescue and adoption advocates are unsure if and when a large influx of horses needing help will come because of the pandemic.

Read more at HorseTalk.

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Equine Metabolic Syndrome: A Horse Health Enigma

Similar to other companion animals, obesity in horses is common—it's estimated that between 20 and 70 percent of horses are overweight. Ponies have the highest risk of becoming overweight, followed by cob-type horses.

Obesity is also one of the most prevalent health conditions in humans.; it's associated with premature mortality, metabolic dysfunction and a myriad of health conditions. In horses, obesity-induced conditions include laminitis. Because of this, obesity is important to both human and equine medicine.

Drs. Natalie Wallis and Eleanor Raffan note that obesity regulation can be disrupted by both genetic and environmental factors. The heritability of obesity is high in humans and lab animals, with evidence showing the same in companion animals.

Laminitis is of significant concern as it is such a devastating disease. The risk factors that link obesity and laminitis are collectively called equine metabolic syndrome (EMS). EMS is defined as insulin dysregulation. Insulin resistance is common in EMS, but it's rare for horses and ponies to actually become diabetic.

Add to that discovery that not all overweight equines develop EMS, and EMS doesn't always cause laminitis. Last but not least, not all horses that have EMS are overweight. These paradoxes exist across breeds and between individuals, similar to humans, where there is variability between individuals and between ethnic groups.

The scientists concluded that obesity is a health concern of both humans and horses, and more research is needed on the molecular basis of obesity and associated metabolic conditions. They also note that veterinarians have much to learn about obesity from human genetics and laboratory animal models. They hope that by using both of these, animal studies will be fast tracked

Read the review here.

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Brain Waves And Equine Welfare

While not the most widely available diagnostic option, measuring the brain waves of horses shows promise as an objective tool for assessing stress and welfare in horses. Often equine welfare is assessed by how people feel when they find animals in particular situations, rather than on scientific findings, Drs. Nora de Camp, Mechthild Ladwig-Wiegard, Carola Geitner, Jürgen Bergeler and Christa Thöne-Reineke note.

The study team created a pilot study to see if an electroencephalogram (EEG) could be used to objectively measure animal welfare and associated physiological states. An EEG detects electrical activity in the brain. The researchers used three adult horses for the study. The horses were recorded for 30 minutes a day for six days. On each day, they were either resting or placed in stocks for a veterinary treatment, which is stressful to horses.

EEG readings were taken throughout and the videos were assessed on the science-based Horse Grimace Scale. The researchers reported that they were able to see differences in EEG activity between the rest and stress phases of the study, which corresponded with significant changes in the Horse Grimace Scale scores.

They conclude that EEGs may be used as a tool to objectively asses animal welfare and well-being. They note that a crossover into human medicine is also a possibility; EEGs could be used as a tool to help determine the comfort level of people who are unable to actively communicate.

Read the full study here.

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Unintentionally Overweight: Many Owners Promote Horse-Human Bond With Calories

Equine obesity is considered one of the most pressing welfare concerns for horses in Britain, as many horse owners are unable to recognize that their horses are overweight, a new study shows.

University of Liverpool veterinarians Drs. Tamzin Furtado, Elizabeth Perkins, Gina Pinchbeck, Catherine McGowan, Francine Watkins and Robert Christley found that between 31 and 54 percent of Britain's horses are overweight. More horses than ever are being used as hobbies, meaning that the horse-human relationship and the ability to care of the horse well are central to horse ownership.

Ownership in this manner, which focuses on relationships and time spent together, brings complex dynamics regarding weight into play. Canine obesity is intricately tied to the human-animal bond, in which the dog is “humanized,” blending the line between human and animal. The scientists set out to determine if the same forces were at play in the horse-human bond that might cause owners to feed their horses too much.

British horse owners consistently underestimate how much their animal weighs and they believe a horse's weight is affected by his job and breed. For example, owners may believe that a show horse can be fatter than an event horse and that a draft breed can consistently weigh more than a lighter breed.

To study the issue, the researchers used 16 threads on online discussion boards, and completed 28 interviews with leisure horse owners, and 19 interviews with equine professionals; they also used two focus groups made up of 21 additional horse owners. They discovered that owners found it difficult to determine what “fat” is compare to how they think a horse should look.

When the owners became aware that the horse's weight could be a threat to their health, but could also be changed, they likened the challenge of removing the weight to a war. They believed weight management was difficult and that it would negatively affect the horse-human relationship.

Once an owner recognized that their horse was overweight, they had to shift how they saw the horse—the extra weight not longer indicated that the horse was in good health; it represented a health problem. How the owners thought the horse looked with regards to weight were reflected in the language owners used.

Though owners knew what steps should be taken to remove excess weight from their horses, such as ramping up exercise or limiting caloric intake, they were sometimes reluctant to take the necessary steps for fear of damaging the horse-human bond, the researchers report. The conclude that adjusting the social norm of overweight horses being OK could be done by celebrating and promoting healthy horse weight. They note that management strategies that maximize horse welfare, like living in herds or turnout on dry lots, would make weight management more positive.

Read the full article here.

Read more at HorseTalk.

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