Jan Ladewig - Vancouver 2015 The other 23 hours of the day

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extent been replaced by loose housing.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.
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.

Видео Jan Ladewig - Vancouver 2015 The other 23 hours of the day канала International Society Equitation Science