Horse Welfare, Laterality, Hair Whorls & Cognitive Bias

For those of you like me that grew up in the 1960s, you’ll remember the hilarious TV sitcom “Mister Ed” about a sober and sarcastic talking horse who only talked to his owner, a genial but somewhat klutzy architect named Wilbur Post, thus causing a variety of opportunities and frustrations for Mr.Post. I never missed an episode. Mister Ed’s anthropomorphism made the show so funny, but anthropomorphism, “attributing human attitudes and states of minds to animals,” defeats science. A singular achievement of nineteenth-century biology, through such writers as Darwin and Huxley, was constructing and objectifying language to describe biological phenomena.

When I ask people? Is your horse happy? Does he have the best life you can offer, and if you could ask him, would he agree? Invariably the answer is yes. When I ask why, they begin to say things like he gets steady meals every day, he gets exercised every day; his stall is always clean, he doesn’t have to live with other horses that bully him; when the weather is good, he can go out into his run and look at the stars at night. When I hear words like this, I feel SAD, and the theme song from Mister Ed starts playing in my mind; “A horse is a horse, of course, of course, unless it’s Mr. Ed.”

It’s impossible to enter their minds, read their thoughts, understand their emotions, and know their choice if they had a choice. Temple Grandin taught me how to see through the eyes of cattle and how they perceive the world we make for them, and I taught her how to see the world through the eyes of the horse and understand how they feel about us. Like Darwin and Huxley, we constructed and objectified language to describe these biological phenomena.

How the horse constructs their perception of us begins when they open their eyes and take the first breath. In two earlier posts, I described the negative consequences of intensive handling of young foals and the positive approach I take through a non-intrusive neo-natal handling method I use. Here I begin a theoretical journey designed to take you through the developmental stages from birth to weaning and early adolescence and into the critical phases when the horse is “broke to ride.” It may take two or three 1000-word posts for the journey to end, but in the future, I hope that when I ask, is your horse happy you’ll be able to provide an objective rather than a subjective answer.

The experiments conducted by Severine Henry and colleagues described the differences between intensively handled foals and those left undisturbed. Here I explore the reality of foal handling everywhere, from the backyard stable to the fancy high-tech barns where the world’s best horses are born and the handling they receive. In the Henry experiments, she also described unhandled foals, which in reality, is rare. Most horses receive minimal to extensive handling. With our best intentions in mind, we often disturb the natural development of foals and complicate the transition into the unnatural environments we create.

The first step in understanding this transition is the recognition of genetically based individual differences in nervous system reactivity and the differences in fearfulness that form the foundation of the temperaments and personalities we recognize in young horses. In my “New School” approach to horse training, the hair whorl (from now referred to as cowlick(s), is the word I used before becoming a scientist and a single word easier to type than two. The cowlick(s) is the horses’ inherent instruction manual that doesn’t require translation into different languages to understand. It’s the first thing I look at when the foal is born, and if something goes wrong when putting together a good, well-adjusted horse, I can always refer back to the instruction to find out where I went wrong. Without this instruction manual, in my expert opinion, most young foals are mugged; you heard me right, muggings that vary between a simple robbery to a violent robbery and a pistol whipping for good measure. As a prey species motivated primarily by fear, think about it from their perspective; they don’t understand our misguided “good intentions.” How these muggings affect foals differently depends on the cowlick position; the lows may perceive them as frightening, whereas the high cowlick foals may be traumatized for life. I don’t have to explain in too much detail what these muggings entail, except that ANY forced handling at this development stage can have short-and long-term impacts on health and welfare. They can range from misguided showers of affection to the attention they receive in the foaling barns of million-dollar racehorses, where an attending veterinarian and a staff of technicians complete thorough health examinations that may include blood tests to ensure sufficient colostrum absorption for the necessary antibodies foals require within 15 hours of birth. Some will argue that the quality of the mare’s colostrum is affected by multiple factors, and they are correct. Still, good-quality colostrum can be collected from the mare and visually inspected by its color and consistency without invasive handling of foals.

The idiom, “The road to hell is paved with good intentions,” may apply in certain situations, and sometimes we have to do things we don’t want to do, but if we don’t always need to do those things, we will keep getting the same results. Those results are shifts from an optimist viewpoint of the left-brain dominant left-side cowlick horse to a right-brain pessimist view and a dramatic increase of the pessimist view of the right-side cowlick horse. Including and depending on the young horse’s fearfulness as time goes on. If your horse had any forced handling in the first few post-natal days, it sets the stage for cognitive bias shifts to take place. As Lesley J Rogers put it in her paper titled “Relevance of brain and behavioral lateralization to animal welfare,” chronic stress may maintain the dominance of processing by the right hemisphere.

I encourage everyone to go back and read my posts on the intensive handling of foals and my low-stress, non-intrusive method. Any horse exposed to any handling, even no handling described by Severine Henry, is on the path to maladaptation to the abnormal environments we demand. In the next post, I will continue this thought experiment by exploring more early experiences like halter training, veterinary and farrier experiences, and other daily interactions and their influence on the developing animal. A horse’s first experiences are critical to forming future responses, and abnormal environments create abnormal behaviors—the Horse Behaviorist UT mantra.

I want to ask a favor of everyone reading and liking my posts, don’t just like; please FOLLOW my page. I’m working overtime as a cattle consultant promoting cattle welfare that pays my bills, and I can’t keep up this pace for long. If I get enough followers, I can earn passive income from Facebook, allowing me more time to write, edit, and stop making so many spelling errors. I have at least a year’s worth of 1000-word posts to spit out in my goal to close the OLD SCHOOL approach, open the NEW SCHOOL, and end the critical welfare concerns affecting the horse industry today. According to FB analytics, 57,900 people have read my posts in 28 days since I started, 13,867 have liked my posts, and five people have disliked my posts, but I have only 704 followers. That’s only 1.2%. If that number could rise to even 5%, I promise to keep it up. Unless those numbers change, I need to write less and take a few days to catch up with the cows. One more thing, if you’ve never seen the gelding Bamboo Harvester, aka Mister Ed, youtube.