Hi there, it's me again! How are You doing? We've entered the darkest season in Southern Finland when there's not yet snow on the ground that would brighten the landscape, but the days are short and the Sun stays mostly behind heavy clouds. Temperature goes back and forth between zero Celsius which means everything freezes and melts every day. In other words, the muddy and rainy but cold season is here!
This post is about to be more of my own thoughts, since there's not really much going on with the horses now but the normal daily routines. Surviving the mud and so on. I've been thinking a lot about how to keep the horses so that it would construct the best conditions possible for the horse. Obviously at least here the climate tells there's no way of letting them run free in the pasture of the year round. It would be best for their bellies and minds if they had the chance, but there's just no grass growing in the winter. Of course we could give them bales to eat, shelters to cover from the weather and so on, but how does that differ from the paddock life anymore?
This debate about horse keeping conditions is endless, since there are as many opinions as there are people. In my mind I've found the best for my horses is to have a balanced herd and a paddock. My horses don't stay the nights in boxes, they live outdoors and have a good shelter with a dry floor of strain to lay down for sleep. Of course they all have been in boxes for vet and farrier treatments for example and they know how to calm down there, but daily they don't stay there for hours. As some competition horses and expensive horses in Finland do, they may be out for some hours and mostly stay in their boxes, all alone. And on the other hand I understand why this is, it's a very expensive hobby to own horses. But in my mind I'm thinking that all horses need horse company.
Of course my horses are still foals and youngsters, they can't be compared to for example competition horses. Still I think a horse needs at least one another horse to be in contact with. We had our colts in the summer pasture in a herd of seven where an older stallion was the boss and the rest formed their hierarchy on their own. So sad we don't have a paddock big enough to keep the herd not separated, now it's down to four with my colts. But they seem to enjoy their company, they sleep side by side and there really is no fights between them ever. Of course they play, run and wrestle, but it's not serious. Mentally I think this means a lot for them.
And there's the point I was entitled to make in this post: the basic needs of a horse mentally. Many of us these days do know and have conditions updated to keep horses well physically. The boxes and shelters are measured and environments are safe, hay quality is good enough and so on. This is also why we couldn't just put the seven stallions in the same paddock. There is a lot in public about the species-specific needs that come from the tradition of ethology. But what do the horses need to keep their minds as well as their bodies? Can there be such a thing as "horse psychology"? This popped into my mind as I'm a student of psychology and found myself thinking, if we know this much about how humans need other humans, autonomy, feel of capability, feel of control and that on, why would it be any different for horses. We all are animals in the end, even horses being prey animals and us humans the ultimate predators.
Self-efficacy is an interesting concept in psychology which kind of includes a lot of issues in human well being. Taking it straight forward stands for one feeling of being able to do an act asked to perform. That's the crucial point: You possess the feeling that You are capable, You have what it takes to do a certain thing. And I was thinking, why would it be any different for a horse? Of course they don't have a brain system this complicated as ours is and they don't think this much, they react more. But as the research goes further, it's always found that even horses actually do feel, do think, more than we have earlier assumed.
For humans the way to build stronger self-efficacy is to have more autonomy, more feeling of capability and more acceptance by peers, family and significant others. These are the psychological basic needs of humans in Self-determination Theory by Deci and Ryan (2000). The theory itself is a lot more complicated than I refer here and I suggest You get to know it if You're interested at all. It's very enlightening. For example parents can do a lot to make their child's self-efficacy strong, or mainly destroyed. Also bullying in school has long traces in adulthood when it comes to feeling confident and competent in life overall.
So why would it be good for us to have our horses feeling confident and competent? I argue it makes our co-operation more safe. In the end I believe it is the very same point many animal educators have been telling for years. Also many of us think this way naturally, it feels the way it should be. But at least here in Finland there's a tradition of riding schools and a culture of handling horses that has told us to control the horse, tell the horse who's the boss. Silence the horse. We've been taught to work the horse, not to work with the horse, and there I see a big difference. In the first adaption the horse has no other option than to obey, it has no say to what happens to it. The second point of view gives the horse a voice of its own, even when the human is still responsible for what they are doing and how it's done.
When the horse has a feeling of self-efficacy, it has a voice, it has a chance to tell that it is feeling uncomfortable before it bucks off the rider or bites the handler, for example. When the co-operation of a human and a horse is in two ways, it is a true interaction, the reactions don't need to be that extreme. The horse can relax when it can trust that its opinions are taken into account, even when it obviously cannot decide what's about to happen next. Most horses don't even want to make decisions, most horses aren't the herd leaders by nature. And by talking about leading a horse, I don't mean the old authoritarian leadership that we've learned before, but the more interactive new way.
So from the long poetry back to the point of this blog post! I'm glad there's a lot of new going on in the research field of horse well being. We know more so we can do better. The physical needs of horses are met mostly well I think and the awareness of the psychological needs is also rising. Not in these terms that I've argued here, but in the overall climate. It's just not good to haze Your horse around anymore even if You're not using a violent tool to do so but Your attitude. What I've done here is that I've taken the points I'm learning in my psychology studies of humans and played with them in the context of horses to see if it could fit. I think there's room for further thinking.
Thank You for reading this far! Feel free to comment or send me a message. Have a happy Halloween / Samhain / Kekri You people and let Your own light shine on in the darkening season. Love Your horses!
Anna
