Personally, and IMHO, I think it is time to review our terminology for equine behaviour! I am the first one to acknowledge that welfare issues within the horse world as a whole need addressing! Some urgently. Some relate to non-ridden horses/ponies, some to amateur/unaffiliated competition, some to professional sport (including racing).
I would never dare to call myself an equine behaviourist, but over my career I have worked with some very competent equine behavioural scientists and hope I might be bordering on an “honorary” qualification 🙂
Some of the research I have been involved in has focussed on behaviour during transport, some on behaviour during competition, behaviour associated with back pain and last year’s behaviour of horses in the stable in response to different sounds.
The International Society for Equitation Science (ISES) has its Annual conference next week (14-16 March) in New Zealand – I presented at the last conference in Hartpury in 2022, but sadly I won’t be attending this one, but Dr Jane Williams (Hartpury), one of her students Olivia Cattle and myself do have a presentation on behaviour of horses during cross-country and Jane will be presenting and hopefully we will be able to live stream or show a recording.
But my main point here is that I feel strongly it’s time we need to move away from a focus on “pain” or “negative” behaviours or “stress” behaviours. I believe we should be looking at behaviour as a whole. I’m not saying we don’t count “pain” or “negative” behaviours, but the focus should not be only on these. Dr Sue Dyson who has pioneered “pain scoring” through the development of the The Ridden Horse Pain Ethogram (RHpE) told me that she originally did not want to use the term “pain” but was forced to by reviewers in order to get her initial work published. In addition, the classification of “pain” or “negative” behaviours can be somewhat subjective. The interpretation may vary between different observers and the context in which a specific behaviour is exhibited. My over-riding concern is that if we continue with a strong focus on behaviours to which we attribute negative connotations then we are damaging equestrian sports SLO.
