How often have we heard about a horse, or horses, who “turned bad,” “went sour,” or turned out to be “counterfeit” (i.e. the horse’s true bad nature did not reveal itself until later)? Typical complaints include a deterioration in work performance or attitude without an obvious physical explanation: a show horse who refuses to leave the in-gate, a jumper who starts having more rails or refusals, a dressage horse who loses his brilliance, or any one of a litany of “naughty” behaviours including excessive spookiness, bucking, kicking, rearing, bolting, freezing, biting, head shaking, self-mutilation and so on.
Horses, unlike humans, simply do not to have the cognitive sophistication to become social deviants for personal gain, revenge or pure malice. While at the International Society for Equitation Science last year, I was struck by the number of equine scientists who felt that behavioural problems generally attributed to psychological pathology, or a horse’s bad nature, nearly always had a root physiological source.
WHY ARE WE MISSING THESE UNDERLYING PHYSIOLOGICAL SOURCES?
1. The source is hard to find
The common rule to uncovering the source of a behavioural issue is to rule out any physiological factors first. The difficulty is that this “ruling out” often involves a great deal more searching than the average one-hour vet visit is likely to entail. Since pain does not always show up in an obvious lameness, but often in these performance and behavioural indicators, a diagnosis is often elusive. Furthermore, the underlying cause may not reduce to one major physical problem, but instead have its etiology in multiple minor physical problems that each on its own would not account for the behaviour, but cumulatively could well do so (McDonnell, 2005).