Research based evidence leads us to understand that riders, coaches, judges and most humans involved in training or using horses for performance pursuits tend to have poor abilities in identifying signs of pain in horses, and more so whilt they are undertaking ridden, performance or training activities.
As a result these visual indicators and behaviours are often categorized as the reaction to training, rider influence, or classified as a normal state of ‘personality characteristic’ for that horse because it has been a reliable repetition of behaviours for a long time and they have always gone that way.’
Unfortunately, this often leads to a disregard of problems that result in persistent and chronic pain. The horse is continued within it’s performance or training program, which usually leads to a further worsening of the source of the pain, and a consolidating of the pain related behavioural responses.
With the inability to verbally ask the question of ‘is this painful’, we are left with translating behavioral and visual cues. Add that to the nature of the horse as a highly evolved prey animal, which demands it to be inherently stoical and hide all signs of weakness. This is including ill health and pain as a survival mechanism, it makes it very difficult to ultimately divide the presence of pain from behavior.
We do know that if the pain is removed, logically relative behaviors tend to cease virtually immediately. They continue to diminish in reliable response, as the horse ‘learns’ through exposure repetition that the associated stress of the pain (not the pain itself) is not longer relevant. The learn reaction, from the pain is 'unlearned' so to speak.
One thing is certain, with assured removal of pain (ie. nerve blocks) there is ALWAYS a cessation of the undesirable behavioural response if pain is the only relative problem. However, when acknowledging the way that horses learn and associate stimuli with response, and the way we humans like to solve problems and ‘fix’ things - this is rarely the simple case when trying to determine the cause of chronically present behavioural, and or pain relative issues.
Problems such as learned stimuli and accidentally associated cues taught throughout the usually prolonged troubleshooting process are hard to separate from the learned negative stress response which is acquired as result of pain. Aside from this, associated musculoskeletal imbalances in tone and spatial deficits are usually always associated with the physiological response of the horse experiencing chronic pain or non pain related behavioral distress.
Behavioural problems can exist without pain, but unfortunately there is infrequent appreciation of equine pain at this stage without a multilayered and complex ‘iceberg’ of equine behaviours associated to it.
Pain and behavioral changes go hand in hand.
We could perhaps begin to understand if we imagine we deeply felt a physical requirement to hide our pain, and that if we expressed our pain, we were in danger of attack or our life was likely under great risk. Eventually we would become unable to cope with this and feel acute distress that may overwhelm us to the point where we cannot hide the pain anymore. We may not be able to move the way we did before when the pain first started, and we may no longer be able to change our movement to accommodate the pain to a level where we can cope. This is in a sense, a representation of the behaviorally responsive ways in which the horse copes ‘instinctively’ with pain.
So, it is very hard, and very complex to work with. Fortunately researchers such as Dr Sue Dyson are developing ethograms which present us with reliable behaviours that are associated with the presence of pain, such as the equine pain face.
More ethograms are being developed for niche circumstances such as ridden horses where the iceberg of behavioral patterns are even more complex. This is due to the influence of the rider at the time of the behavior of the horse, and progressively the adaptive habituation that occurs as a result of training.
Ultimately we, as influencers of equine behaviour and movement need to understand what is ‘normal’ or logically an outcome for a horse during what we ask of it. We need to understand more about what the horses preferred behaviours and movement patterns are.
This allows us to then recognize what is not within that range of expectation and start to investigate further what the catalyst may be that initially shifted the change from a state of predicted ‘norm’ to a behavioural dysfunction.
