🧪 Signs of pain in horses are observable. Could AI systems enhance or replace human observations of horses experiencing pain? Revent research by Lencioni et al demonstrated that their system could classify between pain/no pain with overal accuracy of 88.3% journals.plos.org/plosone/arti...

Pain assessment in horses using automatic facial expression recognition through deep learning-based modeling

The aim of this study was to develop and evaluate a machine vision algorithm to assess the pain level in horses, using an automatic computational classifier based on the Horse Grimace Scale (HGS) and ...

journals.plos.org

The precision with which kick threats can be sent - and received - without injury is 👩‍🍳💋

🧪A field study looking at health issues of managed 🐴 found those housed in open barn groups showed fewer incidences of colic & lameness than stalled, solo🐴. While open barn 🐴 had ⬆️ incidence of open wounds, they were minor enough to not interfere with the 🐴’s work. scholar.google.ca/scholar?star...

Welcome to Trail Cam Tuesdays! Camera ID: Conway Location: Onaqui South Herd Area January 2025 The Onaqui Catalogue uses carefully placed cameras to catch horses day or night, allowing us to see which horses are staying together even when we can’t access them. #onaquicatalogue

🧪Test to determine the ‘tameness’ of 🐴s prior to transport could lead to a ⬇️ in transport-related disease & injury. Also, for non 🐴 folks, ‘unbroken’ 🐴 are more at risk than ‘broken’ ones. Because 🐴 people historically call the 🐴s we’ve trained ‘broke’🤷‍♀️ #quietpartoutloud www.mdpi.com/2076-2615/11...

Development and Validation of a Test for the Classification of Horses as Broken or Unbroken

Regulation EC 1/2005 has stricter rules for transportation of unbroken (untamed) vs. broken (tamed) horses, but does not provide adequate tools for their identification. This study aimed to develop an...

mdpi.com

An opinion hill I am prepared to die on: Orange is the only appropriate flavour for chewable vitamin C tablets.

🧪TL;DR Horses NEED social interactions to thrive. New research from Flamand et al showed that even one hour/day of free social interaction improved the behaviour of stalled horses: fewer stereotyped behaviour, less time in hypervigilance, more optimistic bias scholar.google.ca/scholar?as_y...

🧪 Despite what Hollywood says, blindfolding a horse to get them out of a burning building may take longer & require more lead rope pressure than not using one. But it may make it easier to help navigate a horse past visually 😱stimuli if training isn’t an option www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

🧪When not starting fights in the scientific community about correct pronunciation, vibrissae are much more than useless ’whiskers’ on a horse: sensory organs linked to specific 🧠 regions. Removing them compromises a horse’s ability to safely navigate their environment. madbarn.ca/whisker-trim...

Being a person with deadly, incurable cancer who is nonetheless still alive for an indefinite timeframe gives me an interesting metaphor that helps me deal with things like large-scale corruption in government or commerce. Bear with me for a second while I try to explain.

When horses do invisible skipping rope triple unders #nichepost

🧪Ooh, alert! Recent research looking at how a friendly (& long) maternal presence promotes maturation of brain territories involved in both social behaviour & physiological regulation IN HORSES, MY FRIENDS! Another paper to support rethinking premature weaning of 🐴. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

The horse, the myth, the Yellowmino legend: Calcite.

🧪Pain is an unpleasant experience, one from which horses are not exempt. Pain can cause horses to behave in ways people don’t like. Being able to recognize pain is a learnable skill. A new validated pain scale hopes to help with that. www.frontiersin.org/journals/pai...

Frontiers | Development, refinement, and validation of an equine musculoskeletal pain scale

Musculoskeletal disease is a common cause of chronic pain that is often overlooked and inadequately treated, impacting the quality of life of humans and hors...

frontiersin.org

🧪Hot off the presses! A study by Torcivia and McDonnell showing a behavioural signature of gastric discomfort in horses: nuzzling, swatting, nipping and/or gazing at the abdomen, often associated with ingestion or anticipation thereof: www.mdpi.com/2076-2615/15...

Behavioral Signature of Equine Gastric Discomfort? Preliminary Retrospective Clinical Observations

Gastric ulcer disease and other potentially painful gastric conditions are among the most common afflictions adversely affecting the welfare of domestic equids. A large percentage of affected animals ...

mdpi.com

What a treat it was to sit down with applied ethologist & canine behaviour consultant Kim Brophey recently to record the latest episode of our pod. It was an edifying discussion about what our primary focus should be when assessing welfare of animals in training. podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/n...

Kim Brophey: Rethink animal welfare & training

Podcast Episode · Not Another Dog and Pony Show · 2024-12-06 · 59m

podcasts.apple.com

Screenshot of the moment the UFO tractor beam lifted my Calcite into the mothership. #horsebehaviour

Many ethograms for horses are photos showing specific behaviours. While great for some behaviours, such ethograms aren't great for conveying movement & context clues needed for classifying other behaviours. A new video ethogram aims to help with that: www.mdpi.com/2076-2615/14...

Video Ethogram of Equine Social Behaviour

Equine social behaviour studies face challenges stemming from the absence of a comprehensive ethogram with unequivocal standardised definitions and the resulting limits to data comparison across studi...

mdpi.com