Starting the young horse.
As always we had better begin by defining what we mean by ‘starting’! And since
any decision about where to draw the line and say “from this point on” has to be
arbitrary, why not start from conception?
For any living creature it is the environment, interacting with genetic makeup,
which produces the individual. This is true to such an extent that we can
usefully begin by discussing the condition of the mare from fertilisation
through to foaling, since the womb is the first environment a foal experiences.
Thanks to the massive amount of research that has been
carried out on the development of the human embryo we have a good understanding
of those stimuli that get through from the environment in which the pregnant
mother grows her foetus. So we know that stress, whether physical or emotional -
especially prolonged or high level stress - has a powerful impact.
And from this we might generate a very basic
starting rule that we are most likely to get a complication-free birth, and
calm, easy to handle foal by paying a lot of attention to management of the
pregnant mare. And while this article focuses on the young horse we can make a
couple of short statements about what mares require.
As with all horses a management system that allows expression of natural
behaviours is favourable. So ideally she should be part of a cohesive harem
group of perhaps 6 or so adults – including stallion. The group should have
access to sufficient space such that they are fit and active, and be provided
with grazing that provides quantity, quality and variety of herbage. There
should be shelter from the elements, adequate clean water and good management of
parasites – both internal and external. And while the ideal is safety, the
environment should not be sterile: mental exercise is good for the horse also,
so an element of challenge in the terrain is a good idea – given that it is not
greater than that which the horse can reasonably meet.
The point of these few statements is not to say that this is the way things must
be, or that anything less is not good enough, but to give us a point of
reference that can be used as a foundation on which we can build our discussion.
My wife carried our own first child through a period of high stress – which
produced a veritable little tigress – by the third child, things were far more
comfortable, resulting in a baby that was so very easy you could almost forget
that he was around! Of course some of this is to do with both the hormonal and
experiential impacts of successive pregnancies, through which the mother becomes
increasingly better at dealing with the process. And in this respect mares are
very similar, first foals often being smaller and more temperamental than later
offspring.
So let’s first look at the logical results of environments into which foals are
born and that fall somewhere short of the species ideal.
Probably the most common departures from the ideal are those mares kept alone
and with no supportive social structure, but even then it will depend to some
extent on how the mare herself was raised. With luck she may have been raised in
a social group, in which case we can hope that she will have been exposed to the
sight of either her dam or ‘aunts’ (herd ‘sisters’ of her mother, not
necessarily biologically related) foaling and had some opportunity to watch a
pattern of effective maternal behaviour and, at best, to have been able to act
as a ‘baby-sitter’. Clearly a mare with such experience is far more likely to
‘know’ what she is doing than one that has never seen a foal before. And, given
the increasing number of unnaturally kept mares that refuse to have anything to
do with their new-born foals, it’s reasonable to suspect that the lack of such
experience is a critical indicator.
So let’s move on and say that our lone mare has accepted her foal. What are the
likely deficits in the situation? Social contact will be greatly reduced and, if
the situation continues, the foal will most likely fail to be able to
discriminate between what is appropriate behaviour towards a parent and another
unrelated horse. Parents tend to be indulgent toward their offspring, allowing
them far greater latitude for lack of manners than an unrelated horse could be
expected to. This may well colour interactions with handlers too in which case
manners, or the lack of, are likely to be an ongoing issue. Taking this a little
further, there is good evidence to suggest that colt foals will be particularly
badly behaved when raised by a lone mare.
Other problems that may arise are that the mare becomes
very tired, perhaps to the point of exhaustion. In the natural social group the
mare is supported by the herd’s security network, in which one horse, and
invariably more than one, is always keeping watch for danger. A human analogue
of this would be that the new mother might ask a female relative to “keep an eye
on the house and watch the baby” while she takes a nap. Filly daughters, and
even colt sons, will carry out this important task, leaving ‘mum’ to take a bit
of time for herself during which she can graze further away and look for
particular plants that sustain her milk yield or merely rest lying down,
allowing important REM sleep that she cannot get while resting in a standing
position. And beyond these sibling ‘babysitters’ the outer cordon of defence is
maintained by those adults without duties to young foals. The lone mare has none
of these comforts and will need extra feed and care in order to compensate for
the effects.
There has been a great deal of talk over the past 10 or so
years about ‘imprinting’ or ‘imprint-training’ as it is sometimes known. But of
all the useless bits of jargon of the last decade, this has to be one of the
most misleading. Imprinting in equines is something that occurs between mare and
foal only; it is an innate behavioural process through which the two become very
specifically bonded, and which is essential to the survival of the foal in the
natural environment. It ensures that the foal follows its mother only, and does
so automatically and without question, so that there are no potentially fatal
delays when survival requires a rapid escape. And, just as importantly, it
ensures that the mare’s maternal instincts are focussed on her foal only.
According to recently released research the process is supported further by
pheromones in the mother’s milk that promote very rapid learning so, during
imprinting, at that all important first suckle, the ability of the foal to learn
its mother’s individual smell and her unique voice, is enhanced. And from this
it becomes very clear that the process cannot include other individuals;
brothers, sisters, aunts and even fathers are not allowed to interfere.
So the notion that an individual from another
species, and a predatory one at that, can imprint or be imprinted on the foal is
quite bizarre. Were it to actually succeed it would be nothing short of a
disaster.
Of course there isn’t anything wrong with early handling, as long as ‘learned
helplessness’ is not the dominant feature. But such handling should not start
until imprinting is over and, if we need a cue as to when such handling should
start, ask mum! It is very simple to read from her body language when she feels
relaxed about letting others begin the ritual of greeting the newborn,
particularly if she is part of a social group. After a few hours other group
members will be seen making very discreet and short visits, not to touch, but to
look from a few meters away. And, in the natural herd, other mares will often
take responsibility for either refusing or regulating visits from older
siblings. So we might reasonably conclude that this protocol is what we should
also follow: look, but don’t touch! There is no analogue of the human desire to
‘hold the baby’; imposing one is a good way to try your mare’s patience and
increase her stress. Given that you have a good, trusting relationship with the
mare, she’ll be quite happy for you to get involved after one or several days,
depending on the mare. And at that stage, contact can begin without causing
unnecessary stress. We have to keep it firmly in mind that the foal is learning
at a faster rate than it will at any other time in its life, so what we do
should lay the foundation for trust, rather than fear! Ethically it has always
seemed to me that forced interference against the mother’s wishes, unless there
is an extremely good medical reason, is very questionable. Surely the mare has
some rights in this most central element of what it is to be a mammal?
One last comment on this before moving on; studies have shown that such early
handling, even when well done, does not achieve anything that cannot be equally
well done later, so there is simply no valid reason to impose such practices on
mare and foal, except that of wishing to exert control for its own sake.
What is certainly true is that the period during which the
foal is running with its dam and, hopefully, its social group, is one that
offers countless opportunities for ‘teachable moments’. So let mum teach junior
how to pass safely through gates and yards, get on and off trucks or trailers,
eat concentrate feed from a container. A large natural part of a foal’s early
learning occurs through a process called
maternal facilitation. Simply put, the foal is encouraged to do what it sees
its mother doing, but this simple beginning is also the start of the foal’s
induction into mother’s culture and is the wellspring of those experience-based
behaviour patterns that it will carry throughout its life and that will shape
much of its interaction with the outside world. What mother begins will continue
through a very similar but extended process;
social facilitation. In the equine
social group the foal will continue to learn by observing the behaviour of older
siblings, of mother’s herd sisters and of the group stallion. Each is able to
contribute to the growing foal’s knowledge set and, with each contribution, the
ability of the growing youngster to make sense out of its environment and – that
most precious commodity, the ability to predict the behaviour of others – and to
place itself within a variety of contexts. We know that studies of domesticated
animals have shown a reduction in brain case size compared with their wild
cousins. These studies suggest that this is most likely due to the reduction of
opportunity to react cognitively to their environment. So, if you want to
‘start’ clever horses with well developed brains the answer is pretty obvious,
raise them in social groups, add the dynamic of interaction with other species
(humans, dogs, cats, cattle – each one contributes an extra dimension) and play
your part in facilitating their learning of a complex equine culture!
All right – let’s suppose that we have got this far – foal and mare as part of a
little social group – what next? Forced weaning! To wean or not to wean – and if
yes, when? Pretty much everyone is in agreement that forced weaning is extremely
stressful for both mare and foal yet, oddly, they carry on doing it. Why? Well,
listening to what is said; it seems some believe that this is the only way to
breed a foal per year without the mare becoming exhausted and the size and
quality of foal decreasing. And it is certainly true that suckling a foal takes
a whole heap of nutrition! But we know what it takes, since each and every
requirement has been very well studied and researched by a veritable army of
equine nutritionists, so what’s to stop us supplementing mum’s intake with high
value concentrates that contain the whole range of nutrients, vitamins and
minerals that she might need? It would be crazy to argue that cost is the
problem; the foal is going to need this nutrition whether it gets it from his
mother or from the owner’s feed-bowl. So isn’t forced-weaning another of those
bits of traditional equine management that may have been required in the past –
before owners had access to such complete information – but is no longer
necessary now? Most likely yes! Of course, if there are no good reasons why
forced weaning should not be done, then the point is moot. So are there reasons,
and if so what might they be? And why am I calling it ‘forced weaning’ anyway?
Definition time once again! First ‘weaning’; this is very simply the process
that all mammalian mothers go through during which their young are gradually
given less and less milk and finally stopped from suckling altogether. If the
mare is in foal, a good part of the process occurs normally within her body’s
autonomic system, with some extra assistance from her genetic programming that
assures her limiting behaviour towards her foal plays the necessary support
role. This is one of those elements of being a mammal that evolution has got
down to a fine art and, after 600,000 years of practice, this shouldn’t come as
a surprise.
Next: ‘forced weaning’; the process in which humans interfere, quite
unnaturally, to prevent the mare suckling her young, most often by physically
separating the two. Now I suppose that a human mother weaning her baby early,
for whatever reason, is not a lot of fun for the baby but at least junior still
gets the warmth of mum’s cuddles to comfort him, and bottled ‘replacer’ to suck
on when breast milk is refused or unavailable. There is no such comfort for the
foal. Not only does the poor little creature stop getting milk but it also loses
mum completely! And if this sounds like a severe emotional trauma for a young
creature – it is! Not that the mare is going to enjoy the process either!
Now let’s look at what would happen in the wild, and why, and determine whether
we can easily create an analogue for use in modern management. In the natural
state young horses leave their natal band between 2 and 3 years of age,
depending on development. Easy conditions in which there is an adequacy of food
would tend to lower the age (which is what tends to happen under domestic
conditions) while harder conditions make it later. In small groups of, let’s
say, 6 or so adults including stallion, all mares are likely to foal once per
year, given that there is sufficient feed to support them. If conditions include
periods of drought or other factors that serve to impose critical limits on
feed, mares will spontaneously abort. Equally, if group size increases, let’s
say to stallion and 10 mares, then high status mares will foal less often,
perhaps only once in every three years, but they will make a far greater
investment in each foal. It seems likely also that a greater percentage of such
foals will be male. In the larger group, as long as feed is adequate, lower
status mares will continue to foal each year. This then is a brief outline of
the naturally occurring ethogram, as it has been for many, many thousands if not
several hundreds of thousands of years. If, during the process of evolution over
that period, a better variation had developed, which supported a higher level of
evolutionary survival fitness, then that would have become the ‘default
setting’. That it did not argues that there are benefits in this that go far
beyond suckling. And logically, if it is not about growth through milk, then the
benefit that accrues must have a largely (or completely?) behavioural component.
So let’s investigate what that might be.
Young people are very different from young horses in that one comes from a
neotenous
species (in which juvenile traits are held over into adulthood, e.g. our
curiosity, potential for life-long learning and delayed sexual maturation) and
the other from a precocial species
(in which young are relatively mature and mobile from soon after birth, e.g. a
foal’s ability to keep up with its mother in a high speed escape as little as 12
hours after birth.) Even so, we can still draw parallels as long as we keep this
distinction in mind. Recent research on human teenagers has shown that brain
development, particularly in terms of cognitive function, does not reach
maturity until the early 20’s. One of the reasons this has been so vigorously
studied is the alarming death rate of teenager drivers (and, even more so, their
passengers) in car crashes. The research has specifically shown that the teenage
brain is not as able to process information and derive a good danger assessment
from it as an adult brain of 26 years or so upwards. So, the longer parents are
able to accompany their offspring when driving, and the greater time they invest
in helping them to recognise danger and take appropriate action, the more ‘fit’
(in a survival sense) they will be, and the more likely they are to learn safe
driving habits. Of course it goes without saying that a parent who drives
dangerously is unlikely to have the same effect! The point of this is that by
keeping our children with us we are able to pass on a greater degree and
complexity of ‘culture’ than we would otherwise. And in this ‘culture’ there are
literally thousands of pieces of information about how to survive efficiently,
happily and fruitfully (in terms of producing adults that, in their turn, become
efficient carriers of ancestral genes.)
Although
horses are far simpler than humans, in terms of complexity of lifestyle,
intellect and so forth, the same thing is broadly true. So, being with the
parental herd is not just about milk, but about learning how to be an efficient
member of a social species. And if 600,000 years of evolution has produced an
ethogram in which the young horse stays, soaking up this learning, until it is
between 2 and 3 years of age then surely it is illogical for us to ignore it, or
to impose an alternative that offers far less support for the development of
efficient behaviours.
Arguments
that we have selectively bred this behaviour out of the modern horse are without
any foundation whatsoever. Take a group of mares from the most highly and
selectively bred horses on the planet – the racing thoroughbred, that has the
oldest studbook – but which have had no experience at all of life in a ‘natural’
herd or in an extensive environment rather than intensive small paddock and
stable, turn them loose with a stallion that is equally ignorant and, within a
very short period, you will see them return to exactly this ethogram! How do I
know? Because that is exactly what I did, spending close to 15 years watching it
happen, and the development of a complex equine culture that is as highly
efficient in terms of this centuries’ environmental challenges as it would have
been for those of the past.
If the
products of ‘traditional’ or ‘intensive’ breeding were socially and
behaviourally adept and functional there would be no reason to look at this, but
that is just not the case. Each year, greater numbers of horses are produced
that go on to be dysfunctional in a behavioural sense. In the
Moving on
again. When our ‘natural’ youngsters reach this point between 2 and 3 years of
age what happens? Colts are driven out by the stallion and, being naturally very
sociable and co-operative they look for and join up with a bachelor group. And
in this supportive fraternal social group they will then stay, either until they
mature into dominance and receive the assistance of their bachelor ‘brothers’ to
run off a couple of filly ‘wives’ from the periphery of a harem group, or they
become eternal bachelors, always deferring to higher status group members. Play
fighting is one of the most compelling features of these bachelor groups (just
as it is between colt foals and yearlings in the natal band) and particularly
with the newest and youngest additions, who put a great deal of time and energy
into these games and, as a result, become highly practiced and skilful equine
athletes, fast, acrobatic and beautifully balanced. So important a function does
this play serve that those colts born into a family group in which there are no
other colts with whom they can exercise tend to leave a lot earlier in search of
the male playmates they need.
There is much
talk about beginning the training of young horses at two years (or younger) in
order to cause that ‘loading’ on bones and tissue that promotes good profile and
development. But, rather than experiencing this as something into which they are
forced, and which is often made very boring for a young equine mind with only a
very short attention span, how much better to let the bachelor group do the job
instead? Now that would be Ethological horse training indeed! From experience,
injuries from such play are far fewer than those that result from early training
in round pens and schools. What’s more, the colt knows when he’s had enough, and
his proprioceptors tell him when his joints are becoming liable to over-flexion
due to tiredness, something the human trainer could not possibly do anywhere
near as well.
Now, given that we have been steadily keeping up with the
basics of handling, what is the best age to begin training for work under
saddle? Perhaps we might take the word of someone who has achieved international
recognition at the very highest levels of equestrian sport; Reiner Klimke,
Olympic Gold Medallist, World Dressage Champion, European Dressage Champion and
European Horse Trials champion.
Not
only did Klimke ride these championship winning horses – he also trained them!
What’s more if you track down photos of Klimke riding horses such as 1982 World
Dressage Champion Ahlerich, or Maiko or Volt, it is immediately clear that these
are well balanced animals, happy and relaxed in their work. Of starting his
horses Klimke, in his book Basic Training of the Young horse, states; “None of
my successful horses have been shown as 3-year-olds. I bought “Winzerin”, my
three-day event horse at the 1960 Rome Olympics, as a 4-year-old in 1956. She
had just been backed. “Arcadius” came to me as a 4-year-old just backed. I only
started working him seriously at the end of his fourth year and when he was a
7-year-old in 1962 we won the European Championships in
What is true
of Klimke’s warmbloods is equally true of other breeds, and even more so of the
hotbloods. Many an Arabian or Thoroughbred has been spoilt by demanding too much
too early, resulting in a horse that is overly emotional and liable to become so
excited that they simply cannot concentrate on the task at hand. For these
horses a 20 minute session on the lunge at three years of age amounts to
punishment rather than training – and can easily produce a base-level resistance
that will become a defining restriction for the rest of its working life.
Invariably such resistance will be characterised as ‘naughtiness’ or
‘disobedience’ on the part of the horse, rather than ‘impatience’ on the part of
the handler.
Nor is the
down-side of early training limited to emotional impact – there are severe
implications in terms of bone and joint function too where horses are subjected
to excessive weight carrying prior to 2 ½ years of age. Tiredness and overwork
can easily result in repeated small overflexions, in which joints – or
articulations – are made to flex over a greater angle than they should. Each
time this occurs, the bony ‘stops’ and check ligaments that are responsible for
controlling the degree of flexion may be damaged. Such damage may never amount
to anything critical in the normal course of events but, at high speed, or
during the pressure of top level jumping courses, it may become just that,
resulting in a hideous broken leg and death. Anyone who has seen the result of
this in racing will know just how sickening a sight it is to witness and the
habit within the racing industry of starting horses into work as juvenile 2 year
olds must surely account for a good measure of this damage.
There is a lot of talk about holistic approaches to horse
management and training, in which a total philosophy is first formulated and
then put into practice. And what’s good about such an approach is that it
protects us, owners and horses, from the confusion of disjointed elements and
muddy thinking. So while in the past ‘starting the young horse’ was just about
the process used to get a horse working under saddle, maybe entry into 21st
century, instead of being used as an excuse to deny horses’ right or need to
express natural behaviours, requires that we really look at how we do things.
Sticking to a cohesive and well considered strategy might seem like a burden –
but the benefits far outweigh the cost!
(c) AD Beck 2006