September is Animal Pain Awareness Month
September is Animal Pain Awareness Month
Do you know how to recognize the more subtle signs of discomfort in your horse?
Sure, you can see it if they're 3-legged lame - but horses can be so stoic! As prey animals, they have adapted to hide their discomfort as much as possible in order to survive.
The better we get at recognizing our horses' more subtle communications, the more quickly we can provide appropriate care. Hopefully this means we can find solutions to little problems before they ever become big problems!
Recognizing pain signs in horses is **extremely** important because mislabeling a behavioral change as a "behavior problem" instead of recognizing it as a pain signal is so detrimental to our horse's wellbeing. It delays care and can exacerbate problems as we attempt to train through the "bad behavior."
Thankfully, we have several "pain ethograms" to help us decode our horses' behavior and we've linked some of them below:
Equine Discomfort Ethogram - Torcivia & McDonnell, 2021
https://www.mdpi.com/2076-2615/11/2/580
The Ridden Horse Pain Ethogram - Dyson, 2022
https://beva.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/.../10.1111/eve.13468
Can the presence of musculoskeletal pain be determined from the facial expressions of ridden horses (FEReq)? - Dyson, 2017
https://www.sciencedirect.com/.../abs/pii/S1558787817300199
You can also check out my online mini-course Reading and Respecting Body Language if you want to dive a little deeper! It’s only $29 and lifetime access!
