Our columnist discusses what we’re learning about the horse’s brain and body—including some evidence she’s not inclined to believe.
When I was a presenter at the Equine Affaire in Massachusetts last fall, I had some time between work sessions to attend other presentations. One that got my attention was the lecture by Dr. Stephen Peters elaborating on his book, Evidence-Based Horsemanship.
He wrote it in collaboration with farrier Martin Black, and the two of them have produced a PowerPoint presentation to further explain their findings and ideas. The lecture, as the book, deals to a large extent with the dissection and explanation of the horse’s brain as it compares to the human brain.
Step by step, we were guided through the inside of the horse’s head, and while most of the information about how horses think was second nature to a rider or trainer, there were some pieces of the concept that were a tad difficult to accept.
When it comes to the cerebellum, which is about the size of a large tangerine and represents about one third of the horse’s brain, we can recognize it as the structure responsible for learning and storage of physical movement and motor routines. It’s in charge of balance, coordination and timing of all movement. Through repetition, learning takes place, which is stored in the cerebellum and eventually creates changes in the nerve system that become dedicated to performing a certain task.
At first the learning takes a lot of attention and awareness, but with repetition the tasks become routine, and eventually they can be performed on autopilot. The same thing happens in people, but in horses the process is not hindered by an analytical mind, which often gets in the way of learning because the person worries about not “getting it,” looking foolish or failing the test.
Horses don’t think that way, because, according to Dr. Peters, horses lack a developed frontal lobe. The frontal lobe in humans is responsible for planning, assessment and intelligent discourse.
According to Peters, horses have no reasoning power whatsoever but learn everything by repeating motor patterns. They do, however, have to be in the correct emotional and neurochemical state of arousal for learning to occur.
Here is where dopamine comes in. Dopamine is a molecule that is transmitted neurologically and is considered to be the chemical that delivers feelings of pleasure, self confidence and motivation. Horses, like people, are affected by dopamine, and once they have established a pattern of dopamine-enforced learning, they can become very skilled at discriminating what kind of behaviors get rewarded.
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Although the frontal lobe of a horse is not as developed as that of a human, we know that horses have a terrific memory. They seem to forget nothing, which is nice when it comes to learning and pleasant experiences.
Unfortunately, it works just as keenly when it involves negative events. It can take forever to erase a bad memory from a horse’s mind, as any trainer knows!
When I had a chat with Dr. Peters, we agreed that the horse’s memory is very well developed, but I doubt we would have fully agreed on the issue of the frontal lobe. Repeatedly, the book points out that the horse has a very small and inactive frontal lobe compared to humans, which makes him incapable of any kind of reasoning or emotion such as we experience.
This is where some of us may butt heads with the authors, never mind how clearly we can see the pictures of the parts of a horse’s brain on the screen. We all know that our horses display a range of emotions, and the book agrees with this, but we also know and deeply feel that they have distinctive personalities and that some of them are a lot more clever, even calculating, than others.
All the little signs horses give us that there is more than memory and flight instincts in their brains cannot be imagination. Or can it?
Studies Versus Experience
The study of the brain, human and animal, is still a work in progress, and I think all of us who communicate with horses daily and appreciate all the indications we interpret as affection and intelligence suspect there may be more to this story than meets the eye when we watch a PowerPoint presentation.
Whenever the authors of this excellent and clear description of what happens in a horse’s head point out that there really is no “human” type of communication going on between my horse and me, my knee-jerk reaction is a barrage of protest because I don’t want that to be true. And I know I’m not alone in reacting that way, in spite of the evidence presented.
Dressage riders, in particular, spend so much time communicating with their horses. It is inconceivable to us that the horse does not share our perception of intimacy with him. Perhaps the minimal frontal lobe that horses do possess in fact does function just a tad better than science demonstrates? I know MY horse’s does!
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When it comes to our way of managing the lives of our horses, the book points to a number of horse husbandry habits we accept as normal that, in reality, are contrary to the nature of a horse.
Our biggest mistake, and the cause of many of our equine problems, is to lock horses up in stalls. This is convenient for us but detrimental to the mental and physical health of a horse. As an ambulatory animal, the horse is designed to be in constant motion and busy grazing when he is not asleep.
To quote from the book: “Continuous grazing means plant material enters the stomach steadily. It digests food quickly. Plant matter then moves slowly through the horse’s long, twisting colon. Ideally, when the horse moves freely, the bowels are stimulated to process this fecal matter. If the horse is not allowed to move, he is more prone to colon impaction. Even though feeding grain may provide nutritional benefits, it results in reduced chewing time, less salivation and more rapid passage through the stomach. Feeding grain also denies the horse the opportunity to slowly graze at leisure to maintain constant gut fill and it interferes with natural behavioral and psychological components related to the ability to free graze.”
By preventing the horse from moving, sometimes as much as 23 hours a day, we’re asking for trouble. His digestive system and mental balance are at risk when we lock him up, and a multitude of problems such as colic, injury from getting cast, or just repeated kicking in the stall, plus bad habits like cribbing and weaving, are some of the results of a horse in confinement.
The idea of vigorously riding for an hour or less and then putting the horse back into a prison of immobility is bizarre anyway if you put yourself in the horse’s place.
There are many other issues brought up in Evidence-Based Horsemanship that will cause you to nod your head and wish we were able to allow our horses to live more like “real” horses. Not because we don’t care for them meticulously and watch over them all the time, but because we sometimes rob them of a natural lifestyle in our pursuit of riding pleasure and competition.
None of the information in the book is a totally new revelation to us, but it details, examines and explains things we already sort of know but sometimes choose to ignore. In our high-pressure world of competition it’s good to be reminded that nature has a plan for everything and that a healthy respect for its design can stand us in good stead when we communicate with and care for our equines.
Anne Gribbons was the U.S. Equestrian Federation technical advisor for dressage from 2010-2012. She has trained and shown 15 horses of her own to Grand Prix and competed in 10 national championships as well as in Europe, including the Aachen CHIO (Germany). Seven of her horses have been U.S. Dressage Federation Horse of the Year, and she was a member of the 1995 Pan American silver medal-winning team for the United States. Anne is a Fédération Equestre Internationale five-star judge, and she’s been a member of the FEI Dressage Committee since 2010. She started contributing to Between Rounds in 1995.
