Humane Cattle Pens, Custom Designs and Behavior Consulting
Abnormal Hair Whorls
Part I
Before I continue with Part 3 “HORSE WELFARE, LATERALITY, AND HAIR WHORLS & COGNITIVE BIAS, I want to get this out of the way. Several people have asked me about the confusing behavior of horses with abnormal whorls. As I wrote in a previous post, “HAIR WHORL POSITION AND LATERALITY (side preference) DEFINED,”
“Approximately 70% of horses have a left side whorl in the medium to high ranges. 10% to 15% have hair whorls on the right side. Approximately 10% have two side-by-side whorls, always in mid-to-high ranges, never low. The remaining 5% have multiple or two whorls, one above the other”.
It’s the 5% I want to concentrate on so I can refer everyone who asks to this post. I don’t want to take off my science hat except to say that animals suffer from a wide variety of mental and physical disabilities and pathological conditions like mild autism to Down Syndrome, Prader Wills, Williams–Beuren syndrome, and others. Even learning disabilities without physical disabilities are common.
The article I attach here is comprehensive when describing the different hair whorls patterns seen in horses. I can’t entirely agree with all of it because my personal experience is greater than the authors, but it describes what Temple Grandin and I classified as “Abnormal Hair Whorls.” The cattle pictures are from a research study done by Temple and I that looked at normal and abnormal semen in yearling Angus bulls. The bulls with abnormal whorls failed breeding soundness exams 70% of the time. Under a microscope, the the sperm cells in the dish had more abnormalities,like two heads, or two tails, or swam in an eratic manner, or slowly and there was more mortality (dead sperm cells), compared to the bulls with normal whorls. This paper is published in the Journal of Theriogenology, which is a journal dedicated to breeding genetics.
