On Saturday 26 April 2014 from 9.30 to 17.00 Prof. Jan Ladewig will speak on the topic "The other 23 hours in a horse’s day". Organized by Italian Horse Protection Saturday

Most horses are handled or ridden for only a few hours every day. The rest of the time they are by themselves. Obviously, if we expect our horses to perform optimally, whether during riding competitions, during leisure riding, or in other ways, and if we expect them to be safe to handle and to ride, we must consider the quality of these other 23 hours.

Horses have evolved to live in social groups on open plains watching for predators. A large part of the 24 h period they spend moving around slowly while they graze. Their anatomy, physiology, and their psychology are shaped to these conditions, and thousands of years of domestication have hardly changed these characteristics.
The conditions for many riding horses are very different from what horses evolved to live under. They are housed in individual confinement in closed buildings. They receive two to three meals a day and exercise for about one hour. Although more horses are let out on pasture nowadays, often they are kept alone on a flat, un-stimulating square with nothing to do.
For other social domestic animals such as pigs and cattle, individual confinement has to a large extent been replaced by loose housing. A similar change still awaits most horses. But many horse owners are afraid of keeping their horse together with other horses, because they fear that they will fight and injure each other.
From observations on feral and wild horses we know that, although aggression naturally occurs, horses rarely hurt each other. One possible reason is that they are better socialized because they grow up together with conspecifics of both sexes and of many different ages.
If we want to improve the quality of the other 23 hours we need to mimic natural conditions as much as possible. To do so, we need more research on areas such as the socialization process of horses, how the optimal group composition should be, the effect of keeping horses in large groups, and how we best enrich the horse environment. Layperson’s paragraph: The more the environment of riding horses is shaped like natural conditions, the more harmonious they will be, and the better and safer a performance we can expect of them.

Jan has a degree in veterinary medicine from the Royal Veterinary University in Copenhagen, Denmark, and a PhD degree in Animal Behavior from University of California, Davis, USA. He worked as a research associate in Germany, conducting research on behavioural and physiological reactions to stress in cattle, pigs and horses, as well as measurement of motivation in pigs by operant conditioning procedures. Jan has been an active rider since childhood. He is particularly interested in the scientific background of training horses, as it relates to riding safety and horse welfare.

Local Council Meeting Room (Sala del Consiglio Comunale), Montaione (FI)
Numbers are limited, please book your place: m.cavallari@horseprotection.it – tel +39 347 3694804