You may be pretty familiar with how your dog looks to you when he wants something or demonstrates acquiescent or aggressive behavior when asked to obey commands. While you may depend on the tail wag and eye and head position of your dog to alert you to his feelings, you will need a different level of finesse to read your horse. If you take the time to learn to “listen,” you may find that your horse is communicating volumes of information. Horses demonstrate specific body postures when relaxed, or when resisting or acquiescing to an interaction with their humans. All animals show their emotions with physical postures but even more uniquely, horses are able to make specific facial and eye expressions that can tip you off to their emotional undertones.
Behavioral Signs of Discomfort
It’s easy to decipher when a horse is upset or angry: The snaking neck, the bared mouth, the threatening stance of potentially kicking out, the hunched back when saddled or girthed. It’s also easy to determine when he is complacent and comfortable based on his soft eye, relaxed musculature, and cooperative nature.
Yet, more subtle signs of issues take a bit of time to sort out. It is often difficult to determine whether a horse is acting out just “because,” or if he is, in fact, feeling pain or discomfort. Signs of stress are sometimes obvious based on how a horse interacts with the environment, other horses, and people.
A horse with discomfort, pain, anxiety, or illness demonstrates many variable signs. A stoic horse that tends to internalize his emotions may be difficult to read. Some signs are indicators of an obvious problem while others are more subtle and warrant further investigation. Subtle changes in body language include:
- Decreased activity
- Lessened interest in surroundings
- Retiring to the back of stall or paddock
- Standing with head lowered
- Decreased appetite
- Decreased interaction and socialization with other herd members
- Grumpiness
- More overt signs of a problem include:
- Lessened weight bearing on a painful limb
- Restlessness, pawing; or depression
- Flank watching, pawing, rolling due to colic pain
- Self-mutilation, such as chewing on a painful leg
- Changes in attitude and/or performance
- Rearing or bucking behavior when ridden, especially with problems of spine in neck or back
- Hypersensitivity of the flanks
- Aggression
Behavior-based assessments require longer periods of observation, particularly if a horse only experiences minor pain.
Physiologic Signs of Distress
Veterinarians and scientists measure a horse’s emotional state and/or pain based on an elevated heart rate, or blood testing to identify increases in blood cortisol and/or beta-endorphins, or elevated oxytocin levels. During periods of distress, oxytocin levels increase. Blink rate is associated with dopamine levels, which tend to elevate with pain.
Physical efforts to detect if a horse is experiencing pain or discomfort further rely on somewhat tedious and time-consuming methods such as the use of non-steroidal anti-inflammatory (NSAID) or opioid-type medications or hands-on manipulation and palpation of musculoskeletal structures. A horse’s limb withdrawal from manipulation may direct attention to a painful area. If the horse improves on anti-inflammatory medications, then that may point to a physical rather than solely a behavioral problem.
Yet, these parameters aren’t easily measured without professional expertise, instrumentation, medication, or laboratory results. So, without initially relying on these protocols, how can you figure out what your horse is “thinking?”
Horse Grimace Scale (HGS)
A different paradigm of body language markers is currently used to effectively assess equine pain and discomfort. Not only are a horse’s ears and eyes extremely expressive, but mobility of lips and nostrils further expresses emotion. A coding system of specific facial expressions has been developed to correlate with a horse’s pain or discomfort: The Horse Grimace Scale (HGS) was developed by an Italian veterinarian, Emanuela Dalla Costa, and her colleagues.
Changes in equine facial expressions are detectable quickly and from a distance and so this assessment is applicable during routine daily work around the horses. Some training is helpful for the best discrimination of what you may be looking at.
Complex facial muscles enable a horse to express a wide range of facial movements that convey emotions. Easily recognizable facial action units include:
- Asymmetrical and lowered ears or ears held stiffly backwards
- Contraction and tension of muscles above the eye area with tightening around the orbit
- A withdrawn and unfocused stare
- Strained or flared nostrils
- Muzzle tension and/or pursed lips with a pronounced (crescent-shaped) chin
- Tension of facial and chewing muscles
In a grooming study, discomfort was identified by…
