Horse Welfare, Laterality, Hair Whorls, Cognitive Bias & Early Experience: Factors that Affecting Bonding with Humans

Before discussing my “new school” approach to factors affecting bonding with humans during the pre-weaning stage of development, I want to explain the behaviors shown by colts and fillies raised in the “old school” traditions that cause serious welfare concerns. The experiences horses have before being “broke to ride” indicate the underlying issues from intensive handling and fear from forced handling in the pre-and post-weaning stages of development, leading to impaired psychological functioning.

The foal in the picture is Bill. I bought and gave Bill to Temple Grandin as a symbolic gift. She asked, ” What will I do with a horse?” I said, “Whatever you want, he’s yours to decide.” I told her she could give him away, sell him, or you can leave him here, and I’ll raise him. She said, “Okay. You raise him.” I said alright, but you gotta name him; he’s your horse. So she named him after her High School science teacher and mentor, William Carlock. If you ever saw the movie about Temple, with Claire Danes, the Academy Award-winning actor David Strathairn played William Carlock (Bill).

I bought Bill from an Arabian breeder who was “old school.” When I picked up Bill he was wearing a halter, dragging a lead rope about six feet long, and tripping on it as he ran from us. The woman and I trapped him in the barn and dragged him to my trailer, where I physically had to pick him up and lift him in.

When I got home, I put Bill in a big stall on my ranch with my friendliest horse Jim for company. I went into the stall daily and sat on a stool with a bucket of grain, carrots, and apple slices. Jim tried to hog it all, but Bill watched Jim and soon wanted some for himself. I waited for Bill to approach me and made myself small by sitting on the stool and not making eye contact with him. I was trying to figure out what treat he found irresistible. As it turned out, the apple slices did the trick and got him to approach me. To make a long story short, it took three weeks before I could touch him and get the halter off his head, which he had outgrown and was causing a deep furrow in his nose. After three more weeks, I had shifted his cognitive bias back from the pessimist he had become to the natural left-cowlick optimist he was by nature. Afterward, I turned him out with the other horses and began to handle him about once a week. Jim and Bill were inseparable after that, but Bill followed me everywhere when I was out in the corrals cleaning up poop. He grew up to be a well-adjusted horse with splendid behavior.

What I say next may upset people and cause some denial, but if you don’t know the complete history of your horse from the day it was born, then you can’t be sure your horse’s early experiences haven’t had some detrimental effects on its behavior. How I learned to raise horses has shown me that the “old school” way I used in the past caused the same problems I saw in Bill.

The early stages of emotional development are full of potential conflict. A young horse’s experiences polarize into “pleasure and fear extremes.” When these opposite feelings are combined, anyone with a horse about Bill’s age can see the early stages of impaired psychological functioning when they approach the foal. It comes up to you, but when you reach to touch it, the foal backs up (approach, retreat, approach, retreat). I believe this happens after people traumatize them with early forced handling and follow-up by giving them affection and food rewards. It develops into a conflict of emotions horses have with people that sometimes lasts a lifetime.

In their minds, on the one hand, they learn to love us for the good things we provide but still fear us for the bad and scary things we did to them. Horses lack the cognitive capacity to think, “Well, Mark gives me all these good treats and butt scratches, so I should forgive him for the scary things he did to me when I was little. They hold these memories SEPARATELY in both the optimistic and pessimistic sides of the brain. Scientists smarter than me found the left side controls approach behaviors, and the right side controls avoidance behaviors (remember, it’s the opposite in right cowlick horses). It’s a conflict of emotions and the beginning of psychopathology (abnormal behavior). As these conflicting memories build up through early life experiences, they create the antecedent excentricities (antecedent means a thing or event that happened before, and excentricities mean strange or unexplainable behavior) that develop patterns of abnormal behaviors that differ in low, middle, and high cowlick horses. Linda Telling-Jones and others possibly identified these patterns of abnormal behaviors and called them PERSONALITY. It may also explain why the horse world is divided fifty/fifty on the predictive value of hair whorls on personality and behavior. Not all horses have these negative previous experiences and don’t fit the patterns identified in the “personality profiles” some people claim. In other cases, the negative experiences early on may be overridden by extremely positive experiences following early negative experiences.

In the “old school” approach, horses with low whorls develop predictable patterns of abnormal behaviors. Horses with middle hair whorls develop predictable patterns of abnormal behaviors, and horses with high whorls develop predictable patterns. Horses with double whorls develop unique and often unpredictable behaviors, all of which people refer to as PERSONALITY—-but in reality, they may be abnormal behavior patterns caused by dysfunctional environmental influences beginning in infancy.

If your horse has lateral behavior when ridden, or rides well but won’t go in a trailer, or won’t stand for a farrier, or won’t tie at the hitching post, or won’t enter a starting gate at the track, or is a dirty stopper on a show jumping course, or foams at the mouth during dressage competition, or swishes it’s tail, or is hard to catch, or hates the vet, or throws its head and needs a tie down, or has a cold back, or any of the many other behavior problems horses have may not be personality differences, but maladaptive behavior. When I explained this to Temple Grandin a couple of days ago, she told me she attended a dressage competition in Canada recently, and the horse that won was the only one that wasn’t foaming at the mouth.

As defined in human and animal psychology, maladaptive behavior prevents us from making adjustments in our best interest. Avoidance, withdrawal, and passive aggression are examples of maladaptive behaviors. Wouldn’t it be in a horse’s best interest to stand still for a farrier and get it over with so it can return to its supper? Why put up such a fight when it’s much easier to go along? Wouldn’t that be in their best interest?

One of the first questions I asked myself 45 years ago at horseshoeing school was, “If horses are as smart as people say, why is it so hard to teach them something as simple as standing still for shoeing?” The answer I came up with years later was FEAR, plain and simple. Fear from previous experiences inhibits learning and explains why correcting common problems with horses is sometimes tricky, if not impossible. I finally got through to Bill and gained his trust by doing JUST THE OPPOSITE of what everyone else had done with him. And for all the other problems listed above, I found solutions for those too and intend to feature them individually in future posts.

If you agree or disagree with this assessment, please post a simple yes or no comment. I would love to have a poll on this subject before I return in my next post; training the pre-weaned foal with the “new school” approach that I learned prevents these problems from developing in the first place.