“Why Is Foraging Behaviour So Important in Horses?”

 In this episode, we take a closer look at the role of foraging in equine wellbeing. Horses are hard-wired to graze for many hours a day, so what happens when we limit or disrupt this natural behaviour? 

Barbara and Jen discuss their research, practical ways to support natural foraging, and how it links to emotional regulation, behavioural health, and performance. A must-listen for anyone wanting to support their horse’s welfare from the ground up. 

Voice note your questions on WhatsApp to +353 85 143 8688 to have your questions answered on the Podcast.

Meet Your Hosts

Barbara Hardman (Bright Horse Equiation)
www.brighthorse.ie

📧barbara.j.hardman@brighthorse.ie ☎️+353 85 143 8688

 Jen Nash (The Equine Method)
www.theequinemethod.co.uk

📧 Info@TheEquineMethod.co.uk ☎️+44 7902920923

Transcript

0:01

Just before we started recording in classic R fashion, me and Jen realized that we were both missing the same nail. Yeah, we are. We've both got our nails done, and we're both missing the same nail. Clearly, we're just jabbing at our prospective halves. I was gonna try and be professional. See, it's all the mutual grooming that we do, all the scratches to be fair. This week I did do a load of scratches on an alpaca, which was really cute. And then his attempt to mutually groom me back was to show my foot. That sounds like love. I'm glad I was wearing my hiking boots. You don't need to do it to me. I'm okay. Are you following your health and safety guidelines? Sorry. I was not Do you even own them? No, I do not. I have a pair of hiking boots, right? Which are fairly sturdy. And then I also have just a load of barefoot shoes, and then I've got shoes or holes in them, and none of which are health and safety guidelines. That's fine, it's fine by me. We come to you by film this time. We've done a mid-season break and to have a look at the technology, and now you get to see our faces, yeah, yeah, and our missing painted nail and the chaos that is both of our offices. The thing is, you can't see what's over there, you can't see what's down here. It's just that saying of what's it, a duck or swan. We'll go for swan, it's more elegant. Okay. Gliding on the top, frantic. Oh, I know what you mean. Yeah. So just look like a swan. Nobody needs to know what's happening under the water. Except I'm gonna break the illusion by then telling everybody what I got this morning, which was thank you for reminding me wrong video. I need to go blow dry my hair, and then half an hour later, I gotta, I can't find my earphones. Yeah. There's a little swan going. Well, to be fair, it was meant to go to the gym this morning, and then that didn't happen because somebody didn't get out of bed early enough, not me. Okay. Okay. Oh, I was up. Yeah. Everything just got delayed and delayed. Um, and I wasn't gonna wash my hair before going to the gym, so that I had to wash it. Once I told her, Oh, by the way, this one's gonna be video recorded because we're trying something new. So yeah, we're just had to deal with Oh, what I had to add beauticians last week. Yeah, I love how you're giving out to me about like who's the one who's had their lashes done lashes into the beauty salon, and the nails are done. But she said she's a say friend client at this point, you know, like that life goes that way. So she's like, it's like the way you would condition your hair. And I'm like, what are you talking about? And you know, just what what condition? What condition is needed here? Oh no, we're like moisturize my scalp. We're not having the shampoo body water, yes, we are. We're gonna bring everyone with me on this journey while we warm up to this topic, which we'll get to in what an hour and a half's time. I just want that. This is it's 12 minutes past 12 in the afternoon. No alcohol has been consumed. No, this is just standard. One cup of coffee, and then I had uh a sausage sandwich. Oh, me too. Oh, ding. That's what we had. What's wrong with us? We got one missing nail and we've had a sausage sandwich. Is it what we left? Yeah, shampoo debate. Okay, so there's this debate that rages between the two halves of the Nash and the Hardman family. It is a debate that has raged since last year. Uh no, it has actually been since last year, yes. You get so confused. I get I get away with that since December, but yeah, since last year, I get to make it more of an epic battle, yeah, about shampoo and body wash. And I'm like, it is all soap. And Jen and David are very good. It's actually not all the same. No, I didn't say soap. I would at the time. It's all soap. Anyway, that's because Jen has a drawer here, right? I do, I have my own drawer now. Just to make life a little bit. And half of the room is kept tidy for Jen, and the other half is kept chaotic for uh for me. So yeah, a little window into our world. It lets me have like two by two square patch so I can enter the room, get changed, get into bed. Yeah, and that's when Barbara comes here, she has a whole double bedroom to herself and an ensuite, towels folded and presented. I have the towels on the bed for you. I get I put towels on the bed for you. Yeah, but that yeah, but yeah, yeah, you can't call it slander that I do it for you. Was this close to putting a mint on the bed? But I thought that'd be pushing. Were you? Yeah. Hotel Nash. Um so yeah, we're very giddy because we've been back, we've had a good break. Um, so yeah, I think our last one went out and I've been a bit busy on the Runch Christmas, so I do apologize, guys, if you've missed our lovely voices, but we've been working on some good stuff, so now you get us in HD video. Who needs to see this in HD? I don't know, but it's gone. Nobody asked for this. Nobody asked for this. We've just they have to deal with our seeing our faces as well. Listening to us wasn't bad enough. Now they have to so yeah. We're trying a few different things. I suppose, like how the sausage was made, so very much so. It's like obviously myself and Jen do this for fun. We enjoy doing it, and we like talking horses, and there's a good portion of you that enjoy listening to it. I know I do why, but you're here, so this is sort of a new setup to try and help us do more content a little bit more frequently and a bit easier, so we can still go out and actually be on the ground and help people and do all the other bits and pieces. Today, uh, we are talking about I'm over on these notes. Um, we do have notes. See, this is it. You get to see how this is done and our notes because you know there is planning. But yeah, today we kind of um didn't add about a different couple of different topics because both myself and Jen, we have a really cute meat cute story, and Jen can tell you that. But we both did nocturnal foraging behaviour, we did a lot of research in our masters when it came to horses eating, how important it was for behavioural health as well as nutritional health and nocturnal feeding habits and stuff. So part of that dived into what bedding gen, hay nets, slow feeders, normal nocturnal behaviour, and it kind of opens a really nice can of worms to just talk about everything about forage and foraging behaviour in horses. Yeah, on mine, so on my my research, so it looked at foraging behaviour, but also what we couldn't quite call it sleep because we didn't, it's not like we had brain sensors on the horses or anything, but lying down behaviour, recumbency behaviour overnight and uh movement, so locomotion. And in mine, I looked at the differences between stay bold at night and being out turned out in a herd at night. You want to tell us a bit more? No, that's it. Jen's like that. I was going to the paper. Yeah, so and actually Jen's was a follow-on from mine. We had the same supervisor, so this is our meat cute story. And so I had done terrified the who is this woman, this Irish confident woman telling me everything about cameras I had no idea about. You had a face on you that was like, and I know that face now because I know you so well, but no, no, it was a face of thunderous rage, and I was like, Jesus, I'm trying to help her, but it wasn't in me, it was at the technology failing you, which I now know is just Jen. And I was like, Oh god, I'm just trying to help her, like is she all right? Like, and of course, now I know that it was because of the technology, but yeah, so Jen got my cameras after my study, so mine was on slow feeders and two couple of different types, and feeding ad lib from the ground, and then trying to see how long that they were performing foraging behaviour, and did that impact as Jen says, we can't study sleep but sternal recumbency, you know, and full recumbency because then the horse actually lying down, so we assume sleep or further resting, anyway, and then locomotory behaviours, but not in the field just in the stable, and yeah, and then Jen got my cameras and we had that Skype call. Remember Skype? I was I was so unhappy with the cameras. I feel like I was missold. But the thing is, and we we we know why, so that's fine. She would for no I would say that if so, the university that I was doing my research, the undergraduate student was helping me because she was then looking at the daytime behaviour where I was looking at the nighttime behaviour, and she was such a trooper because one of the issues with the cameras for the size of the field when started using these cameras, so everything was massive frustration, and we had such a short window to do our pilot study, there and we could see the range wasn't working, and we thought we'd move them, and we tried so much, and then out of the blue, I think I called my supervisor and said, Oh, you can get like infrared flashlights, which would project more infrared light into the field, and we're like, Oh my god, that that might help, that might do the job. We got the flashlights, then we'd know power. And the bits of information were like, You mean there's no battery in this flashlight? It actually needs to be connected to power, and these fields are in the middle of nowhere. So we had about 20 minutes. It's about 20 to 10 at night. We jump in my car, drive all the way to Halfords, we get the car battery, drive back to the fields. It is chucking it down with rain. I mean, chucking the pair of us there with electric drills, screwdrivers, trying to connect everything up in the rain, using my car for headlights to light up what we're doing. We finished at about midnight by the time we got all the batteries out. Yeah. Didn't work. Wasn't worth it. And we have great memories. Like, we have such great memories doing this. It was such a laugh. There's so many pictures of us literally drowned rats being like the poor horses were just like you could hear us because the horses had microphones on their head collars to record the foraging behavior. Well, that's what I was about to say. You're you that was one of the things I loved about your study. This that was so clever, and I'm gonna ask you more questions about it in a minute, but I do love the mad rush around and then for things not to work and just being in it, and the level of stress as well. It was so stressful, yeah. Because you do looking back, you're like, I could have just taken more time, I could have just said no to that and waited another week, but you don't feel like that in the moment. You feel like if I don't get this to work now, no, we were given a window because of bonfire night of Christmas fireworks, because of fireworks, because of the time of year, because of students and college time. Oh, you have I literally did just have a window because there were already people booked in for the after Christmas period for those horses. Okay. So I um, but it was because we wanted to look at social behaviour overnight as well. Um, but yeah, that just wouldn't want to work on the microphone, on the microphone till I can hear it. I say it's funny like you say that because something similar happened during my one as well, where because I wanted to do social behaviour too. So originally when I um picked the stables because I was very friendly with the yard manager and still like am. And I was like, when I proposed, I was like, Can I have four horses and four stables, please? It was supposed to be eight to begin with, and then various things happened, as is the world. But we had the four, but what I liked about them was you had your stables, but in between each stables, it was just a standard like field gate, yeah so the horses could stretch over and actually like aloe groom each other and communicate, which is why I wanted those stables. I was like, that's amazing, you know. We can see if we change how we provide forage, will that change interaction between horses? Will it reduce antagonistic behavior? Will it increase aloe grooming? You know, we can compare them. And the day I went down to test my cameras out and do my own pilot study to just for 24 hours to see how it was recording. I walked into the barn and they had during the summer decided to do some renovating and built massive concrete walls in between each of the stables. I literally cried. I was like, it was a whole section of my study that just vanished overnight. Yeah, you know, it is heartbreaking. I know that they went, let's renovate, let's paint things during the summer, let's improve upon the stables. And I was like, But they were great heartbroken that something was missing from that, and then just months and months of watching data. But I want to ask you about the microphones because I love it because it is such a wonderful way, and like when I read your paper, and I read lots of times, do you not remember submitting it for the conference and stuff? Oh, I thought you meant out pure enjoyment, not being like my editor. No, I did not. You read it for enjoyment, really. No, I didn't, and it was one of the things that stopped me, and I was like, that is fucking genius, absolute genius. It was just those with there's of like a window of admiration of being like, I, you know, it's so good. Like, I wish, I wish I had thought of that from mine, because that would have been brilliant. Because I had no sound from mine, it was all visuals, so I was having to look at the footage and go, is that browsing embedding? Is that eating hailage? And then I had to create an ethogram that was very much had to be broader rather than narrower, and you'd want narrower things down, so that was really hard. And then I read your paper. And do you want to tell us how you you measured chew rates? Because this was really clever. I'm loving all the praise, but it was not my original idea. Just been a no, it was John's original idea. Who it came from because it's really cool, it's even coloured to my and we got all the words I need. Ah, yeah, yeah. No, it came from because another girl in my year at Edinburgh, she was she was doing a nocturnal foraging study as well, but she was tracking nomadic Shetland ponies in Shetland. So she was tracking, so she was living in Shetland, camping out or staying in Bothys, doing a full year, because obviously she did write this up seasons between spring, autumn, winter, spring of these ponies as they move around the islands and their social behaviour and how they behave at night. And obviously, there was no chance for putting up cameras or camera traps or anything she's doing on her own. And she was the one who did the pilot study against so she did like a camera and a pilot study of um matching up sound waves of chewing with horses being videoed, and it matched up and it was approved basically as a way of foraging behaviour. Yeah, um, but yeah, fair she she got the dissertation award deserved from it 100%. Um, so it's because we had the same supervisor. When I was having all the issues with the camera, she just then was like, Oh, why don't we do this? Well, the student is doing, and I was like, Oh, thank god. So they had the head colour on, and then you attached microphones to the head colour so that you could record their chewing. Is that right? Yeah. I'm just wondering, we can share screens on this, can't we? Yeah, we can. I have my dissertation before you do, because this isn't you. Before we started, Jen logged on and I went, What did I say, Jen? Don't touch anything. I'm not touching anything yet. I know I'm touching it on my side. I'm not touching anything. Yeah, because we can't be trusted with technology. Things without even I'm I take after my mother and I find ways of breaking technology that people didn't even know was possible. So while Jen tries to break the technology, I'm gonna explain how it works. Because when you have sound files, you have frequencies, and when you actually look at the sound file as a visual, you get some really nice visuals of like there's a frequency and there's the bars that it hits. So, what's lovely about that is like really quickly you can measure the chewing sound because it's going to have the same crunch to dun, crunch to dun, you know, each and every single time. So you can really quickly go, is the horse chewing? Because of the way the sound waves look and count it up really quickly. And I was just like, that is brilliant. The now the visuals were great doing it. I'm glad I had the cameras up because we got a whole time lapse of what was happening for each horse all night visually as well. But if we had that at the same time, you would have to do that. You could also tell a difference. So the horses had, yeah, you could tell when they were eating on grass or when they were eating on hay, um, because a sound wave would be bigger because there's a harder crunch. And sometimes horses were lying down, and we knew they were lying down because they had these things called um ice cubes, they're made for dairy cattle, and they have a three-way axis, so it can tell the difference between movement at what speeds, um partial recumbency and full recumbency. So yeah, yeah, so like basically but you'd you don't see anything from the outside. No, but it's basically it's it's an electronic gyroscope. We all have them in our phones now, pretty much. But some of the horses were eating or chewing. But what we don't know, we'd what we don't know, and this is what we really cute, is were they eating in their sleep or chewing in their sleep? Yeah, no, no, no. I don't know. We don't if you have like cats or dogs at home, you know, like Izzy will do that where she'll just do the little woofs in her sleep, you know what I mean? Or we had a cat when we were kids and she used to suckle her her paw. So she used to put her paw down and go as if she was still nursing, and she used to do it in the one place every single time. Um, and of course, looking back, I'm like, I mean, she was a childhood cat, so I'm like, okay, now I'm going, was her needs not met? Was there something else going on? Is that normal behavior? But she actually had a little patch on her fur that was the bit that she used to suckle on all the time in her sleep. And of course, we were like, Oh, this is adorable. Now as an adult, I'm like, oh dear, was that a behavioral problem? And I'm like, You were a child, Barbara, you couldn't have known. Like we also saw there was um the younger horses, there was one in particular. Oh, and we didn't, you wouldn't as in as in walking in on the yard in the morning, you would not have known that that horse was having colloc bouts almost every night because we could see it on the sensors because the horse was up and down and fast movement, because obviously that's when the horse is probably twisting over and rolling around, and then for the for those stables, we did have cameras, so then we could take the ice cube data and look at the stable cameras, and you're like, Oh, yeah, that correlates, so we can see that that is rolling, that is tossing around and stuff. But we didn't see that in the field. All horses had fast movement because they all went for gallop, they all just went for cat, and you could hear it, you could hear the on the on the microphones as well. It's great for us to be able to talk about both these pieces of research because although both me and Jen have presented our findings, the findings that we presented are only the ones that we can significantly say that there's a difference or there's no difference, but there's so much that you do and you see when you do research like this that goes beyond what's actually presented. So, one of the things that I found on repeat was every single one of those horses at about five o'clock, six o'clock in the morning to when humans first arrived, they all stopped eating, they all started doing hypervigilance behaviors, and they all stood and looked at the door. Like two or three hours before humans arrived. They were like, within this window, humans are turning up, like they're coming, you know. So even if they had some hay left, they had hay provisions, they just sat and waited. Like that they were they are waiting for us, like, and and of course I couldn't measure that, I didn't have control, but I could see it like every single morning, every single time, which is incredibly like it made me quite heartbreaking in a way, because it's like you would you would then turn up to your stable and think, oh, my horse has had plenty of food left over, they've not eaten all their hay, they've they've not been without hay overnight, but actually they've spent so you're saying about five o'clock if you didn't turn up until eight. Yeah, because they're waiting for something, they're waiting for their turnout or you know, a different type of feed, or just huge like they're waiting for something. I mean, it's all sort of a speculation, but it's particularly that hypervigilance as well, like all just looking at the door and waiting. I also had one horse, one little Connemara, like 15-1 Connie, who without fail, he used to pull the feeder off the wall and then he'd curl around it to sleep. And like, what are you doing? Like, literally like a cat, and then he was forever breaking out of a stable, skewed my data. I'd come in, and all the other horses were like, he's just he's gone, like he is gone, and he's like in a field, just like hello, tis yourself. Best time ever. Yeah, and then I'd have it on the cameras of him like pulling it off the wall, throwing it to the back of the stable, then opening the stable door, and then just being la la la la la, out we go, you know, and then all the other horses watching him go, being like, dude, where is he going? That's again the thing. Of course, Connie. Oh, of course it was Connie, yeah, it's an absolute superstar. Like, I love the bones of him, but I was fit to kill him at times. I was like, if you skew my data to the point where I cannot find significance, I'll kill you. Even though I had that, and um, it was still highly significant the difference between foraging times and stuff when horses were provided with snow feeders. There was just no comparison whatsoever. It it made such a big difference. Um, and again, the other one as well, anecdotally, because I only had one during the study from the time that I'd picked the horses to when the study started, one of the horses got sold. And I was like, Oh my god, you're kidding me. So they had a new owner. Now I had to go and re-sign confidentiality stuff and ethical approval from the owner, and of course, she was like, Absolutely no problem. So when she originally bought the horse, she started on this study, so she was getting increased browsing time and enrichment in the stable with the slow feeders. And she was getting this for like a good portion of three weeks, really enjoying the horse. She was flying out, she was doing ride-outs, she was having so much fun with lessons, and then a week after the study ended and the slow feeders came away. She came to me and was like, She was in tears. The horse was really hard to handle, the horse wasn't doing ride-outs properly. All this explosive and problematic behavior happened. And I remember her saying to me, she was just like, I think it's because she doesn't have these feeders anymore. And it's amazing that such a small change. Again, not significant because I would have loved to have done that with the rest of them once I got that information back. But I would believe it, I would 100% believe it, you know, because of what we know when horses' needs aren't met, when they don't have enough time to forage and browse in the stable or out at pasture, you know, when their needs aren't met full stop, we do see more problematic behaviors. So it would confirm with everything that we know in the research anyway. But it was just such a and I felt so sorry for this person because I was like, you could buy a soul feeder if you really want to, and then it would help. You could just fill that void, you know, and yeah, it was just, and I was just sort of standing there feeling really in an ethical quandary because I was like, I'd introduce something that really supported this horse, and now I've taken it away because I was doing an experiment. That's just putting a whole lot of pressure on you. I know, but you still think it in some way. If the owner recognized that, then they had a duty to then do something about that. Yeah. What else? We had one horse who didn't lie down in the stable and was being used as an educational horse in the daytime. Lay down in the field at night, but I don't have the data, it wasn't part of my study to look at behavioral responses during the daytime. I was looking at nocturnal behaviors, and you're one person when you're doing a dissertation, whether you're undergrad or your masters, you are in a timescale, you're on your own to an extent, you can only do so much. So we're getting all this information. So, like the young horses, I had young horses and old horses, and that was an interesting difference. But also by not mistake, but just happened that we were in falling boxes, the stables were massive for the young horses, and maybe just adequately sized for the older horses because they were all like 16 hands. It's like, what impact was that making? Because they were also, I think the average age of the older horses was about 14-15 years. So you can guarantee they all had arthritis of some sort. So, how much was that affecting their behavior? Their lying down behaviour. You just you start here, and then you're like, Oh, that's interesting, and that links to that, and where could you go? And this is why I think a lot of people get annoyed with behavior as a topic because where does it end? It's all interlinked, and there's never one answer. There's never just, oh, this happened because this happened. Yeah, it's like there's also that's a contributing factor, and oh, it's never ending. And I think what's interesting about that that you've said, and it's similar to one of the horses in my study as well in the yard, and they were in the opposite stable, and I had another horse who I came down in the mornings, I was made because I'd weighed the hay and check how much was eaten and so on and so forth. And this horse had lows left. I was like, Why is going on? Went back and checked the videos and like that again, spent two nights not eating and not lying down, just hypervigilance, watching this other horse that arrived on the yard. It was just something that you know nobody ever thought of. It's like, oh, here's a new horse, there's an empty stable, pop them in there, happy days, without thinking of and you know, because you might be sitting there going, like, okay, I've moved my horse to a new yard, I need to make sure that they're settling in well, I want to make sure that they're okay into this new yard. You do not think about the resident horses, do we? The same way in a in that situation, everyone else. So this horse had not slept for days. Like, I watched it not lie down at all, not eat or very little, and just sat there in hypervigilance, watching, watching, watching. And then I'm like, okay, and and again, who would have known that that was happening? So then during the day, is this horse being you know exercised? Is this horse being schooled? What type of work is this horse doing? If that was me and I had insomnia and I was stressed and I was lying awake all night, how could I do anything the next day? You'd actually be at risk of injury, yeah, absolutely. And then it's funny because we then do things with our horses, and we're, you know, we're going, they've never done this before. Like this is out of the blue, and we look for something in the moment that can explain it, you know. Uh, oh, they don't like that white van, or you know, there was something in the bushes, or they don't like that jump, or it was really windy that day. And we could be completely wrong because we're trying to attribute something that's there in the moment, and it could have been last night, it could have been something that night that messed up their their next day. And we have no idea. Yeah, sleep deprivation is a real thing, and injuries related to sleep deprivation and behavioural issues related to sleep deprivation, gut issues, all of it. There was a great study done years ago, I think it was maybe 2019, looking at sleep deprivation in horses and injuries in induced and like happened in the stable, and horses just collapsing and like unexplained knee injuries or swellings and stuff like this, where horses have just literally collapsed. Fall into the ground, yeah. Fall onto the ground, and especially on it's all too common now that bedding doesn't cover over 70% of the stable. It might literally be a metre or two at the back, and that might even if it's one to rubber matting, if you've got a 16-hand horse, that's a lot of force, and they will hurt themselves, especially if it's happening quite often. Then you have horses who are actually scared to go in the stable because they just associate the stable with that fear. Because for a flight animal to lose consciousness like that, terrifying. Do they then generalize stables with trailers, stables with kind of areas of horse walkers, of wash boxes? Whenever I'm in a small dark space, I feel I lose control kind of thing. You just don't know, it can escalate. Oh, my horse won't load, and connect that to are they sleeping? No, you'd be happy with this is the way this has gone. I just didn't know if we could take breaks. I mean, take a break. 100 seconds. I love I'm in my shorts and everyone's down getting it. Um yeah, because I think I know that's a response. I'm getting cold. Oh no, you can absolutely, because it's still gonna, you know, I can still take this out as an edit and stuff. Yeah, because I think it's just nice for us just to have it as a welcome back and a quick chat and then into the next half season too, so I think yeah. Because there's so many people, Jen, who just enjoy listening to podcasts because they enjoy listening to people talk. Yeah, sorry, I just ended up. Yeah, I keep looking at you because I'm talking at you, but then I'm trying to look at the camera as well. No, you you look awesome. Because what this should be able to do as well, I did a few of them. I posted a reel a little while ago on the learning theory one. So I just said find me five key moments in the hour and and create a reel for me. And I have five of them there, and it that was one of them, and I didn't have to do anything. That's what I was thinking of doing with this, and going once we have the podcast, go give me five key moments, and then five reels, and it'll be like picture and picture, like one above and below the two of us, and do a green screen in the background for us if we want to, and then there's our reel. So, you know, the way before we were taking it out Buzzsprout, yeah, and then we have the reels with us in front of us, much more people to look at, I think. So it does it. I would have to close down my web browser, but you can share screens. Can you? So I would I would have had to close everything down and back up again. Um to do that. Okay, I think it's nice us talking about it like this as well, because it's it's a bit more like if they want to, they can go and read those papers. But us talking about our experiences of it lead nicely into things because the sleep deprivation is really interesting, I think. And I was going to follow on from that if you're happy. Yeah, the sleep deprivation for me is like I know we have a little bit of study, but I don't think we talk about it. Enough, we talk about it quite a lot with you know canine behavior, which I think is really important, and there is a group called the Calm Group, the canine arthritis and management. And the lady on that described it as like a sink. And I love this analogy. Imagine your day-to-day life is a sink, and it's hot water and cold water are pouring in, and they're just stressors, and that could be just going to work every day, doing physical exercise, just being awake and doing things, but you need to have that drainage component, otherwise, you're gonna tip over, it's everything's just gonna pour out. And universally, for every single animal, REM sleep and sleep is part of that drainage. If we know the impact that it has on people, like things like sleep apnea or disrupted sleep or insomnia, we know that it has an increase to diabetes, yeah, exactly. Like, you know, as I suffered for now, the weight's kind of come down a little bit, but my weight went through the roof a couple of years ago because I had such bad insomnia. Like I'm talking like not sleeping at all till like six o'clock in the morning, you know. And what happened was my weight just went shooting up, even though my changes like in my diet, like because your body's going, I'm not getting enough sleep, so I need to store this because I need the energy, because I'm not getting the sleep that I want. So we know dog, cat, horse, rabbit, human, whatever, REM sleep is so critical. And I think it's even more critical for horses because they don't have as many sleep cycles as we do. It's even more shorter. So if we don't get that window, like was it 15 minutes, Jen? Is that correct? It's something really short. It's only 15 to roughly half an hour, yeah. But but the young horses in mine would lie down for like two, two, three hours at a time. Wow, they can they completely they they not the old horses were down for blocks of anything between 10 minutes and half an hour, maybe 35 minutes. But some of the young horses were down for an hour, two hours, but that's which just did not agree with research in the slightest. Yeah, and that's so interesting because they're probably doing a bit more training and learning. Yeah, they were under three, so they were being used in that college, used the horses for educating students in training young stock, that kind of stuff. But just principles. It's more just the experiences. So even if you were to like forget about the training for equitation, but even if you were to take that young stock and go, okay, well, I'm going to socialize them and show them what a trader is today, or a tractor, or a science cape, or other horses, or just walk them down the road. Do you know that's still a learning cognitive experience? Well, a developmental period of time. Yeah. So we understand, like with children and puppies, and you know, obviously young stock as well, with horses, that REM sleep is critical to support that learning. And, you know, I know I say it like bank it to the servers because you're kind of going, okay, well, I've learned this experience, I have the REM sleep, now I need to file away those critical memories and critical learning. So it makes sense that REM sleep is even more important when they're younger. Then we do things that seem counterproductive in horses for that, right? So we go, okay, well, we want to then, as you say, put them in a stable so it's convenient for humans so we can do that training. But then a horse, depending on the individual needs, may sleep better if you have a group of youngsters. No, so in my study, my research showed at winter. So we were looking at winter behavior. Okay. And they did lie, no, the young horses lay down more in the stable than at night. Okay, yeah. But I don't know if it's hypervigilance, but the older horses maybe learned to lie down on piles of hay rather than, but also it was just a non-significant finding. But don't forget that one of my older horses didn't lie down at all in the stable. So she skewed my data and it was a small sample size. And then this is what I'm saying to you about the stable sizes. The young horses were all under 15 hands, they were like 12, 13, 14 hands. So being in a falling box, they had massive stable, the bedding to their body weight, even though the bedding depth was the same through all the stables, yeah, it was probably a more supportive bed and a bigger bedded area for their body size compared to the older horses. So it wasn't as straightforward. The more at once we did the study and we got all the information, then we sat back and went, oh god, this is actually lots of information, but there's so much information that was non-significant because there was just too many variables and things at play. You couldn't compare the two, but it did highlight lots of areas of well, so there were loads of interesting things I found in my study. It didn't give us that many significant results because it's only after we did it did we realize, oh god, this I bit off way too much. Well, for the sake of the audience, I'll explain this. So when you go in to do research like this, you have to try and predict every single factor that could potentially influence something. Now, this is really hard if you're doing an experiment and you're trying to learn about the factors that influence things. So what you do is you have a hypothesis and a null hypothesis, and I won't go into that, but you're basically going as the researcher, this is what I think is going to happen, and you actually work backwards from it. But yeah, this is the frustrating thing about science is you go into studies like this, and you know, you first experiment and you go, let's say before we understood about how REM sleep in horses, you might just have assumed, you know, you turn off the lights at 10 o'clock at night, you go away, your horse goes to sleep, and you get up the next morning at eight o'clock and they're there, and they've just woken up like we would sleep, and then you go and study it, not thinking that that's going to be a factor, and then you see that they don't actually lie down that often, or they, you know, depending on different factors. And then suddenly your experiment has missed critical factors. So, to quote Darrow O'Brien, Irish comedian, and he's like, No, science doesn't know everything, because if science knew everything, it would just stop, you know, and that's the whole point. We're supposed to build on previous studies that we've done before, and we take information, we read the methods, and we go, Oh, actually, we might have missed something here. Even when you read papers and you read scientific studies, that's why we always say, just because we didn't find any significance, it's really important to you present those results. You say we didn't find any difference here, here's our methods, we didn't find any difference here, here's what we did. So that someone else reading it can go, okay, cool, I'm gonna take that and maybe account for it in a different study. The problem with equine studies is that we don't have enough research and funding in you know, behavior in general to be able to do these studies. It's also very difficult to find enough horses to be able to do the research just by their size and stables and to try and keep everything the same because you usually have multiple people handling horses and working with them, they're going to have different lived experiences. Horses are one-trial learners, so things in behavior tend to be quite difficult to study, whereas we and it's just population sizes as well, and being able to follow them throughout their life, see how it affects them, it gets really, really challenging. So we see a lot of studies that are small population sizes, and because of that, I think equine that often gets dismissed because we have small population sizes, a lot of equine researchers account for that in how the methodology is done and how the statistics is calculated, so that we can still say something with a good matter of certainty because there are ways to do things with a small population size, otherwise, we'd have no information. I understand how people can get disheartened by research and go, well, science doesn't know everything, and science doesn't have the answer, so scientists are getting it wrong. But I think people forget that as humans, as a species, we've evolved, we love to hang on to stories and storytelling and old wives' tales, and because Sally down the road heard from this person that they had a horse like this and they had this experience, we're programmed to listen to that more because it's like it's come from a social route, and it feels like oh, somebody else is suffering that I can attach to, and I'm going to take that advice. But always remember that if you were to take away all the research and all the equine stories, all the training that's been passed down through generations that's just come from human learning, and you were to restart again, if all the stories about horses were white and started again, they would not be recreated word for word. Because every time somebody tells a story, it's slightly different and slightly different and it changes. So the information that comes from a storytelling perspective cannot be trusted, but research can be trusted because I say if we suddenly scrapped all the information we had and started again, again, because the studies would be done and the research would be done and the statistical analysis would be done, the stories would be different. And you'd rest up needs more time to get. We want these answers. And that can be frustrating. And it's funny, I think there's a book on human psychology that I was actually listening to recently, and they explained a great analogy for what you've just explained there, you know, bake off, right? You're all given a recipe and ingredients to make shortbread or a cake of some description, and you all have the same ingredients at the same time, you're all able to do it, but the judges will still go around and taste individual differences in those finished cakes. It's the same ingredients, the same finished cake, but we will interpret which one we prefer better because there's still individual variability. It's the difference between, as you say, those stories, they all taste different, they all feel different, and we hear something different, but the ingredients and the way it's baked is still the same. We're still using the same stuff. I understand what you're saying, but people will misunderstand that. Okay, translate Barbara, Jen, go for it. The cake analogy, but I think you can have five people read the same paper, yeah, and away from the paper. Yeah. And it can be completely different to how and this is where misinformation then spreads. And then this little bit of research goes here, this little bit here, somebody takes a screenshot of a paper here and posts it, and somebody takes a screenshot here and posts it, and neither of them have the full context, because neither of them included maybe the limitations of the study, or the sample size, or the actual statistical analysis that was used, what tests were used, what methods were used. So again, you can have different interpretations, and then it gets really difficult. I didn't want to go down the religious route, but if anyone's seen it, there is a great clip of Ricky Gervaise. What how did you say his name? Ricky Gervaise. Gervaise. Gervaise. Gervaise, Gervaise. I love it. Okay. And he's being interviewed by an American talk show host. And Ricky's done a comedian stand-up thing and he's talked about oh, how did he say it? But he was just like, I'm not an atheist, but I don't believe in God. So he was being interviewed, and it was him who said, if you took away the Bible, yeah, to all religious context from all religions, took all of them away, right, and scrapped all research that we've ever done, none of it exists. We start from day one. The Bible will be written differently, the research won't. Yeah. The Bible will not be rewritten, or the Quran, or I don't know all the names for all the religious texts, yeah. But they will not be produced word for word again. But physics, biology, chemistry at the very basic level, produced. The core principles of the universe are gonna still be the same, but the story that we tell about it is gonna be different. Yeah, yeah. I love that. I love that. As it's it's so true, like, and it's really interesting because I know it's very hard for us to challenge our belief systems and what we know, and uh, we're not immune to it. I have my own superstitions as well. When it comes to certain things, like certain food groups that I will use when I'm doing positive reinforcement with dogs or horses, like I found worked better. We don't have a huge amount of science, and there's certain things that I'm superstitious about doing because that's I've gone, oh, that works when I do that, so I only do it that way. If I'm giving chews, I I want fur on, like so the rabbit ears with fur. Not superstitious. You've got evidence behind that. I always go like rabbit ears with fur, or like beef skin with fur, or like reindeer fur like skin stuff with fur. Um, like because you can get pig ears, right? And and things like that, or chicken feet, and they don't have fur on it, and they're just that. And I'm like, no, can't do that, you know. I'm like, no, I have to do this instead. And I feel I has been being really superstitious. Okay, and then we're meeting more behavioural needs of that animal with the defluffing, the tearing. Yeah. No, I agree. I think a dog would still be very happy with the chew full stop. Do you know what I mean? If they're not meeting their behavioural needs, chewing is one of them for dogs. I mean, it's really important normal behavior that helps them decompress at the end of the day. If I had a choice, I'm gonna give you the rabbit ear because the fur, blah blah blah, all the rest of it. But to just go like, well, no other chews, but even just chewing would help. Superstition, that's the education choice. I feel like I'm being superstitious about that. Nah, superstition's okay, superstition is touching the horse, is not having the horseshoe the wrong way around because all the luck will fall out. Oh, yeah, well, I mean, that's true. No, no, listen, guys. Superstition. That is superstition. Right, guys, we are an hour in in depth and passionately discuss the horseshoe. Were we talking about heynuts? I thought we were just having a chat. Like the yeah, no, I was driving the other day and I was driving trying to find my client's house, and somebody had a horseshoe upside down. I almost stopped the car, pulled into the drive, and rang the doorbell to be like, we need to talk. Turn that the fucking right way around. You're just all your luck is gone. All your luck is gone. It's all just poured onto the floor. I just I can't be dealing with this. Oh you can't be doing that wrong, it's wrong. So Angus said at the start of this we're experimenting with some new audio features, and we'd sort of said about hay nets, foraging behaviour. You're just pretending I don't know what we're talking about, and getting ready for this. You literally told me I listened to our barn bonus on in November on shaping, just to see what structure we did, and then not follow it at all. Exactly. I did no previous homework. So I'm no yeah. So speaking about drainage, we're still a little bit of a way away from spring and summer. A lot of people are still struggling with turnout, horses' needs are not being met. Not the ground is just rubbish. So even if you have the fields, there's many horses out there that are getting turned out, maybe grazing for 10 minutes if that, and then choosing to come back to the stable because that's where there's more forage and everything. Even though they're choosing that, their needs are still not being met. So the weather's getting better, slightly, and we've got more daylight hours, we're slightly more motivated to do work of our horses. We want to be getting our horses into work, doing stuff. But I would say this is the hardest time of year. Speaking about drainage, I think what we had planned to discuss was foraging behaviour, the the use of how we can provide forage in a way for horses to benefit behaviour, but also the effects of some of the things we're using. So, like hay nets, like slow feeders. And some of the results are actually really quite interesting and quite surprising. So let's I'll take a step back to what we talked about drainage and just say, like we talked about a little bit about sleep and how that's universal across all species, and then you've got species-specific drainage, which is what's important for that individual species. So, for you know, for horses, chewing and foraging and browsing supports that drainage, so helps reduce that stress, um, and so does you know, freedom and movement as well. So, you know, we have that and social interaction. So the reason we're talking about it this time of year, we are, you know, in an I don't mean this in the movement, but like we're at the mercy of what's available to us and our horses. So we're trying to make the best, and so are our delivery yards, like they're trying to support horses as best they can as well, with the facilities they have. So when we look at drainage, we go, okay, so if, for example, movement is restricted, then the onus is on us to try and improve that with enrichment or ridden work or taking our horse for a walk or doing groundwork. And if the weather is awful, that makes it even more miserable, right? Social interaction, again, as that drainage, it might be limited with turnout. So that leaves good sleep, which we've talked about that as an importance, but also one that is a lot easier for us to manage, and that is foraging. So that kind of brings us on to what we can do proactively as owners to try and support that, particularly this time of year, so that our horses are getting that decompression piece that helps us navigate the last bit of winter before things start getting a bit easier. So, will we talk about hay nets first, Jen? Um, and there is so much more about hay nets than I thought even existed, which is madness. There are there's certain areas we can talk about of hay nets that's been covered. So I think slowing feeding rates is is a main one that's been talked about. Another area that's been researched is force exerted, which I know people once upon a time were worried about haynets damaging horses' teeth, their front teeth, and that's been busted. It's a myth that's been busted. But what has been shown is the content in the haynet, whether it's hay or hailage, and the whole size and the netting or double netting, and also the positioning of the haynet, does influence the force exerted through the horse's head and neck and chest, which undoubtedly will have an effect on their physical health and welfare if there's any issues going on there, particularly if there's any neck arthritis. I'm just gonna talk about all the areas before we dive into one. Oh, yeah, it was just to add to your yeah, go on. And then the the last one that I think is worth talking about after postures is social feeding. So the effects of hay nets on big round bales, whether you go use uh use a large holdnet or a small hold net in a social context, and the effects that has on agonistic and distance increasing behaviors and risk of injury between horses and group housing. So hay nets have been investigated in stables and social contexts in such a wide way that I'm like, okay, this is finally a topic where we have a good amount of information and we can draw some really good conclusions and we can make informed decisions about what suits our circumstances and our horses because it's all going to be different if we're worried about our teeth and our horses' dental care. It has genuinely we have looked at it. There have been longitudinal studies. I think this one is finished up as well, and we do, you know, we found that it has an insignificant, you know, impact on our horses' teeth with hay nets as well. So at least that is positive that we can kind of take away from it. And I would say if you are concerned about your horse's dental care, then it is really important to talk to an equine dentist because they're the ones who are going to be able to support your horse's teeth. Good dental care from a good dental technician is going to be the best thing for your horse, is you know, with long-term dental care. The reason for that being mainly is when we actually look at how horses grasp food and consume food, it's their lips, their prehensile, the lips will grasp that first, and the tongue plays a role to pull that in. So it's not so much biting of the incisors as much as we'd think. This is why anyone listening whose horses suffer EORTH or have had to have um incisors or front teeth removed, you know, the dentist will very often turn around and say, Your horse can still have a grazing diet, can still eat hay, because actually it's the lips and the tongue that take the hay, the long as it's long strands, long fibers, to pull that into the back of the mouth, and then the molars do a lot of the job. And it's funny, you know, horses that are grasping with their teeth, it is actually there's something else going on. Yeah, you know, there is something on, and I have seen clients like that, and we've investigated, we've you know, gone through the behavioural modification, we've had a look at decoy and dentists, we've been able to support them and change that feeding pattern because there's something else going on with their teeth, something that's dental, yeah, or always something dental, yeah. So one is uh who has been on a grass pasture their whole life that is close to the the sea and has sand, a based pasture. So sand is an incredibly abrasive, you know, it's worn down the teeth a lot more, and they're like almost like nubbins and stuff left. So the horse is compensating by doing smaller insides with the bodies inside is not actually using the lips the same way. Now, the zoner's been amazing and has found, just as you said, longer strands. No, I know, but there's definitely a I look it up swart, swart, swart swarth, I oh my god sloth, it's not sloth. I know it's not well done. This is just the madness. Swath. Swath, it is swath, it's swath of grass. Ah, but there's an E at the end. All right, okay. There we go. Has really helped this horse quite a lot, you know, and trying to find ways to be able to support because this particular person, as well, not even a client, friend client at this point as well, has found so this horse owner has found that like she very much thought that, oh, I'm such a terrible owner, I had my horse on hay nets for years, and this is why. And I had to go, no, actually, you know, promise you're not to blame here. You know, you've got a much older horse who's been on pasture that's close to the sea. There's gonna be more sand-based soil that's built over time, and just all of that has been an impact. Um, and to get your horse into their late 20s with worn down teeth. Um, I've had another case as well who the horse chewed exactly with their incisors, not with their meat. They literally, it was almost like a chipmunk. And I was like, whoa, this is really, really complex. And I was like, we need to focus on the dental care. Got in there with a dentist, huge amount of work that needed to be done, you know, put them on painkillers and antibiotics as well because it was that extensive for the teeth that needed to be done. And uh once we had that resolved, the horse started chewing again perfectly, like the way they should, and also critically lying down and sleeping, which hadn't happened before. So, again, all of those things are really tied up together as well in that drainage piece and supporting their needs. I would speak to an equine dentist to see if there's anything else going on. Yeah, I'm annoyed now of this topic, and I can't find it now. About a paper, and it talked about basically the stickiness of the fibre or the forage in your hay knit, and there is a learned component. I'm hoping Barbara might actually find the paper while I talk about it lightly. Was it comparing the like say the stickiness of the forage, whether it was hay or halage, the hay that's this hailage that's really it's like rocket fuel, it smells amazing, but it's tacky and sticky. And what the study the study showed that when horses have been X amount of time on a haynet that has a stickier fibre forage, they learn to exert a certain level of force to retrieve that forage out of the hay net. So they have to do this amount of effort to get the forage. They then swap the horses onto a softer one, a less sticky fibre, the horses still performed the same level of force because that's what they'd learned to do here to the left. So, what Jen is talking about as sort of sticky is like viscosity. So, if you think if if we're all used to using moisturizer, some we have really sticky moisturizer, some would be quite runny. So, like that's kind of the viscosity of it. Sticky is a good word, people your fingers over it, sticky. So, yeah, this is where we talked about differences in science and expanding and everything else. First of all, we're like, oh, okay, is hay nets damaging teeth? And then we investigate that and we actually found more about force, and now we've investigated different types, and it actually goes on here in this paper as well. It talks about the previous studies on double-bagged hay nets and triple, you know what I mean? And does that increase force rates as well? And then changes in posture, and then there's a learning component. As much as Jen said at the start of this, we have so much research on hay nets, there's even more here on force rates and forage presentations. There's another one here as well. This is actually quite recent, this is 2024, and it looks like it also changes depending on the mouth shape and ingested behavior. So the role of morphology. This one's quite recent, and I haven't read it. It's just come up here as one of the other ones that's connected. They did Shetland ponies, Welsh cob ponies, and then four different methods: the ground haynets, partially filled hay nets, and then they've got slow feeder as well. And they found that the intake rates for ponies that were fed and the different morphologies all affected the behaviour and the intake rates as well. So, what does that mean for people listening at home? Yeah, so like you they've got because they had five Shetland ponies and four cobs, you're not, and then because they didn't have a balanced data set, so they could have had, does it say whether they had this abstract doesn't say. So, for example, a normalized distribution of data would be like five Shetland ponies, all mayors, five Shetland ponies, all geldings, and it would be an equal spread of you know ages between them so that you could mix and match. But when you that's a normal distribution of data because it represents the population, so you can do certain statistical tests. It looks like the statistical test they did on this is non-normal, which is normal for equine research, to be fair, because getting a lovely data set is not part of it. But yeah, I say it's just interesting that the differences in the mouth shape and ingestive behaviour and Shetland ponies and the Welsh cob ponies confirm the role of morphology in feeding management. So again, just shows how that individuality, depending on, you know, I mean, they've reached the same conclusion as well about maintaining, you know, a natural posture, you know, as well. Um, but yeah, it's just, you know, again, it says more further studies to fully investigate morphology in echoine species. So I think if we start with haynets themselves, yeah. What what what do we know about hay nets? Well, we know that smaller hold haynets, so this is going back to 2015, we know that smaller hold haynets successfully slow feed intake down slightly and can increase chewing time by about five minutes per kilogram in stabled horses. And that's a nice study in 2015 by Ellis Atal, and that can be found in the applied animal behaviour science. And before I hand over to Barbara, I just want to say that in 2024 there's been a really nice recent one again looking at the initial impact of different feeding methods on feed intake time in stabled Icelandic horses, and that hay nets, and in this study included the use of a hay ball as well, and they found that it can actually increase the chewing time by about 13% per day. Oh, yeah, bear in mind it's a script as well. If you don't say anything, it'll just cut out the dead air immediately. So you can take breaks. So they did find then it was about 13% per day. That was about so using the hay nets or the hay ball, increase the feeding time of about 12 minutes longer per kilogram of food being given. So that's a nice way that you know that you are actually extending your horse's foraging time while in the stable. And that's also nice that's research almost 10 years apart, still agreeing with each other. Numbers have changed slightly, but it's still a significant increase in the right direction. So, one of the things that I really like about haynets is it gives owners the opportunity to provide multiple forage sites so horses can move around more in the stable, and you can provide diversity, right? So you could go, I'm gonna do one haynet and it's gonna have one type of hay. I'm gonna do another haynet and it's gonna have halage in it, and I can put them in different corners of the stable, you know, so you have the opportunity to do that. What we worry about, I think, is the posture, and we talked about the force rates. So, as say, like horses, are they learning to do a certain type of grip? And we know that from one of the research that like a horse will learn how to do a fixed action pattern when they take hay out of the haynet, they're putting that strain on their muscular skeletal system. Now, I think from what we know of the research, and from what we can understand about their behaviour and what we want to support, what we can do instead is say put one haynet in one corner of the stable, then do another pile of hay on the floor, and then maybe as Jen says, we use a hay ball or a slow feeder or a hay bag somewhere else. So we can still replicate that, but we're giving our horses an option. So, for example, if a horse is standing there using a haynet and they only have the option of a hay net to browse from, that means they could be a bit uncomfortable because they've been sitting in that posture for a long time, but they're hungry, they have to stay there. But a horse would naturally browse the hedgerow. So if they eat from a haynet for a while and then they're like, okay, I'm done eating that way, oh, but I've got a pile of hay on the floor over there, they can switch and change posture and they can move around and forage in it to look for things. So that's the one thing I really like about using it from a behavioural perspective, and also providing an enriched stable environment for a horse. And from a welfare perspective, this is slightly anecdotal, but it might give people a bit of a shock. I think if the dog's hungry, it'll eat. If the horse is hungry, it'll eat. And you've turned up to the stable in the morning, and your horse has a quarter or half a hay net left, and you go, Oh, great, they had loads of hay, they weren't hungry overnight. An anecdotal story is when we were in the process of you know, we were identifying arthritic changes in Rubin's SI and his hawks, and we had that medicated, and we picked up that he had a real big muscle spasm in his neck. So he was prescribed muscle relaxant drugs to help soften that so we could do some rehab, get some massage. What actually happened was the muscle relaxant drugs released that tension in his neck, and then for about four days solid, he didn't eat out of a haynet. And at that point, I was only allowed the the yard I was on, all hay had to be in a haynip. So he was starving himself. He could put his head down to the ground, he could graze, but it was winter time, so we'd reduce turnout, and he was choosing to starve himself rather than eat from the haynet. And I'll say this happened for about four days. I think that's when I took him because I was like, this is not okay. So something we x-rayed the neck and we found the arthritic changes, the base of his neck on the left hand side, and then it was a veterinary prescription that he's not to be fed via haynets, only on the floor because it was painful. And my mum's horse back home. They went through just this winter, we were getting worried, thinking like she's 24, 25. We're thinking, you know, she's nearing we she just stopped eating at night in her hay net, or and and for her, we turned out it was just the hay was too fibrous. So great hay, great hay if you want a horse to lose weight, low high fibre, probably low calorie. Yeah, but for her, she was starving herself to the point where well mum's diligent, she will weigh the hay, only eating a couple of pounds a night, like maybe three or four pounds a night. As soon as we started in jet pudding a mix of loose and hay knit and getting some really nice soft, she was starving. Her weight has gained, her behaviour is better, her mobility, she's bright-eyed. We thought that she was maybe this was her last winter, but it was actually just because she couldn't and wouldn't eat the forge that was being provided, and similar to Ruben, actually wasn't comfortable. If it feels uncomfortable, it's not worth the effort. But so will other species, Jen. We see exactly the same. I know I mentioned about the Cam, the canine arthritis management group, like they will talk about the delivery of food for for for dogs as well. And you know this from Bell. So, like this is Bell. This is Bell. So, like, you know, both me and Jen have dogs that are little Miss No Eats, kind of like the little Mr. Men. That's what I call them little Miss No Eats. And you know, chewing and keeping their dental care and all the rest of it, and actually getting them to do doggy things like that has been something that I have really had to try and experiment with my own dog and be like, this is normal, you shouldn't need to do this, you should want to finish your dinner. I'm not eating, you know. We're we're on a starvation, she hasn't eaten last night, and she's eaten a few bits of carrot this morning. We had big zoomies in the the field. Okay, yesterday was a bit stressful, and so yeah, okay, it all next time we're not eating. It's so interesting. And it's delivery and stuff of how we kind of do it and try and encourage them to eat. One of the things that I've learned how to do with Izzy, and we've done this with Belle as well, to great success, is providing enrichment in ways that a very small portion of food in an engaging way, that's a natural way for dogs to eat. And you've done this before with Belle, where you're like, go find it and do some scent work, and it's engaging because it makes more sense because just putting it in a bowl on the ground, there you go, eat your dinner. Yeah, it's not very enriching, and it doesn't make any sense for the dog either. And sometimes we go, like, oh well, you won't eat it, you'll eat it at some point, and we leave the bowl down. Now that's even more confusing for a dog because again, they're a predator. So if they were to find a carcass of an animal that had been killed by something else, they don't know how long it's been sitting there, it might smell a bit funny. If they're really hungry, they might eat it if they're really starving, but they're probably going to avoid it. It might not be safe. And like if you didn't finish dinner and you just left on the table and you left it on the table and you came down, would you eat it for breakfast? No, probably not. You know, so it's not a normal thing for a dog to do. So, like presenting it in different ways, making it engaging, go fine, go sniff. You know, it's just appeared there, it's fresh, it's it's an exciting game. Do something similar with horses. We go, here's your breakfast. You know, they sit there and eat it, and they eat this big meal. Of horses are kicking the stable door, they're looking for more hay. And we're like, Well, it's 12 o'clock, you've already had your breakfast. And they're like, Babe, I don't eat like that. Give me some more hay. Yeah, you know, we're trying to navigate these animals in a human way. And I think that's where resource guarding and food aggression behaviors are often really misunderstood. It's actually really gotten next to and protecting that resource. It's a symptom of something else making the horse feel the need to protect that resource. Yeah, why are they fighting you over, especially if why they fight you over that thing? Whatever it happens to be, whether it's water or sometimes horses will guard another horse as well. Sometimes they'll guard water, sometimes, you know, it's like the there's strange things that they will guard. Now, I actually heard this yesterday, and it was a great analogy, and I'm probably not going to do it justice. But like, you know, say your watch, Jen. If I wanted to take your watch, like would you fight me over it if I went, give me that? But you'd uh like and would you do it every single day? And like if it was something random, I'm like, oh, can I take that? You'd be like, sure, here you go. Do you want it? But if you were to have a fight over it, something's wrong. Why do you need that so badly? If I needed to borrow your watch, and why would you have a big fight about it with me? So for my I can so if we it's a difference between, isn't it? If you were like, Jen, do you mind if I just have a little look at your watch there? Yeah, sure, no problem. But if you just came into the room and you were like, Jen, give me your watch, I'm gonna manhandle it off you right now. I'd be thinking, Well, like you say, if that happened every day, I would start to wonder, because why does Barbara maybe I should keep a hold of this? Yeah, she wants it so badly, maybe I should keep a hold of it. It's not a normal thing to do, you know. So we wouldn't expect, yeah, we we would be worried that you'd be really I mean you're already worried about me, but like just more worried about the standard for life. So like for is there anything else, Dan? Is there anything else that you can think that would help owners enrich a stable, just help them get through the rest of the winter? We have hay nets, we've got slow feeders or hay balls or bags. Is there anything else that they can do that can support their horses in the winter? If you if you want to go through stable enrichment, so I'm not sure what you want. Oh, we just know there's like loads. So, you know, if you just think of like another example of something. So we have you know, anything, just pick one enrichment thing that maybe somebody could do. Okay, so one thing that we used to do um as enrichment with donkeys and mules at Sanctuary was we would hide food under a cone or fight hide food under something. Wow. This is really good fun if you especially if you have hay or you're got bedded on straw. It's not so great if you have a horse that's bedded on a non-edible surface. But you could always move the bed back, or if there's an empty stable, maybe you could replicate this in another location. But hiding food under something that they have to flip over or move, hide food in the hay, under the hay, you can get tires, flip some buckets upside down. The horse then has to sniff around, flip the bucket over, sniff, eat. Chances are they may flip that bucket a few more times to see if more food comes out of it. It's a little bit like your treat balls, but it's more enriching because you give them different textures, it's more problem-solving, and treat balls I have a real love-hate relationship with. They could be they can be useful, but they're also a massive stress source of because it's very rare the horse will get every last treat out of that ball. Some of them really don't understand how to use it. People leave the treat ball in the stable overnight. That's not okay because it's really frustrating for the horse. And if you have horses like Dougal, my retired horse, learned that if he just pushed it into the corner, he'd get the food. Shattered so many. It was not worth the stress. Well, Blossom does that with licks, right? She kicks them, breaks a bit of the plastic, then picks it up with her mouth and throws it against the wall and just shatters the whole lick. So I'm like, right, well, none of that. But to take that, so what you could do is a type of scatter feeding, and so if you have like maybe a sacrifice paddock during the winter, or if you have some, you know, hard standing or something, what you can do is take the same amount of treats that you would have in that ball and scatter little piles, spread them out in that area, and then let your horse in. So their head is to the ground and they're snuffling around and they're smelling and they're going and investigating, they're not actually interacting with the ball, but they're still doing something that is foraging and searching and smelling and searching for treats, and then it's an investigate game. And as I say, you can do the same with the cones because they can lift it up, find it underneath, you know, looking for those sort of things, especially on a day with it's miserable, it gives us something to do with our horses to help engage with them. Yeah, you can do that in the stable because I know, especially where I am, the area, there's just yard rules, you would not be allowed to scatter feed on the yard, or you wouldn't be allowed to let the horse loose on the yard, paddocks, some yards that might, but generally, so there is you can do all of that in your horse's stable. You just have to be mindful of where you're putting the food if your horse is on, say, pellets or sawdust bedding or something like that. You wouldn't necessarily want them ingesting loads of if they're on a straw bed, crack you can just make fluffy piles of hay and scatter feed into the hay and/or hide bits of carrot in the hay and then snuffle around in that as well. Yeah, and it'll keep them busy. It really will, and it'll have a you know, you can even do it and say, like normally we get a hard feed or we make up our extra feed, put it in a bucket and then go, there you go. You could do exactly the same with a bit of that, you know, and mix it. You just reminded me a nice one you can do is actually don't mix your feed. Yeah, just it's really simple. If you feed a chaff, speedy beat, and a balancer, for example, put the speedy beat in one bit, the balancer, and the chaff, because the horse can actually have a little bit of this, a little bit of that. I could that can be enriching in itself, and they can they can mix it up together themselves, or they can browse and have a bit of the chaff, a little bit of the speedy beat, a little bit of the balancer, eat the bit they want to when they want to. Yeah, and you don't have to do that every time, it could just be that every now and again you don't mix their feed just to give them some enrichment. Yeah, tea stations are another one. I have a client who has an amazing tea station. I've seen this, and I was like, Oh, look at my tea station, and I'm like, this is amazing, and it's wonderful. It's something that you could do just for a bit of fun, you know, as a little bit of like a bucket of water, put some mint or herbs or something kind of smelly in it. Camile, green tea, peppermint, something that just makes it very anything. Anything that's just a little bit of fun, you know, something a little bit different to do with them. I'd we're saying all of this, and I would adjust. I do actually it just reminded me, I have a resource of about 25 things you can do with your horse in the stable, enrichment stuff. So if people want to just email us, contact me or Barbara. I made it year just on about the number twist. Um and every time somebody says something new, I add it to the list. Do send send an email on to Jen. It's info at the echoing method. Ah, look at me remembering, yeah, do because these are the kind of things that keep us all sane this time of year. Um they're fun and like oh there's actually one I need to add to it. I've just remembered I need to add this. Um we're talking about snuffle mats and stuff. One of my clients took my list and ran with it and created some new ones. Okay, and so it's on a yard where there's no turnout in the winter. There's turnout of hens, but the horses can only go in that for X amount of time, and it was a very an under two-year-old horse, a baby horse. And she took an empty stable and got tarpaulins and hid food in tarpaulins. Oh, awesome. So the baby and again, it's worth saying, guys, don't do this if your horse is scared of tarpaulin. She's a naive horse, so but this is a naive horse who had no fear, and he had the best time pawing and picking and ripping and finding the grass nuts in the stable. And I think I think it kept him entertained for a good half an hour. And then she said he just he just slept after that. He was knackered because it was fun and enriching. It goes back to what we said at the very start of this about that learning and that REM sleep and all of that kind of stuff. I think we just start about Haynet, I think it's really fun to talk about, is the effect of slow feeder haynets in social housing. Yes, that is very important. Okay, crack on. So there was a paper done in 2022, and the title is Short Communication, Round Bale Haynet Effects on Agonistic Behaviors of Group-fed horses. Okay, so what isn't what's agonistic behaviour when it's at home? So this study was in 2022, and the title is Short Communication, Round Bale Haynet Effects on Agonistic Behaviors in Group-fed horses. It's distance increasing behavior between horses, trying to get them away from a resource. It's that ears back, that pin, that bite threat, that kick threat. It's agonistic is a behaviour which causes another horse to move away from them. And create distance, which is why we call it distance increasing. Which is why we try to move away from the words aggressive behaviour, because the horse isn't actually trying to cause bodily harm. It doesn't describe the function, it's nebulous, so we can't really measure it as well. So yeah. So 15 horses were split into three groups, so five horse per group, balanced for sex and age, so geldings and mares in rough ages, and they were allowed a two-week acclimatization period to the pastures and the groups. So that means two weeks of existing in that herb herd on that pasture. The researchers might have taken some observations, but no core data was taken. Then the horses were evaluated over three weeks using a three by three Latin square experimental design, which means that each group was then crossed over between every different experimental. So we we remember we start we talked at the start of this podcast about there's ways when we have a smaller population size to increase the statistical significance of the research we're doing, and uh and a crossover design and a Latin square is just one of the ways we do that. It makes it a more powerful statistical, you know, so we can we can trust the results a little bit better. Yeah, which is why we love this so much. And like I say, I've given you the title and the the year. If you can't find it, please go and read it because the just the overall results were the fact that total frequency of agonistic threats, so that's the frequency of distance increasing behavior between horses, was at its greatest using the small opening haynets on the round bale in a social environment, increased the risk or the frequency of this agonistic behavior between horses. Because it was then harder to access the food from a behavioral point of view. If they have to work harder for it and they need it, it's a valuable resource, they're going to try and keep distance between other horses because it's gonna take them longer to get it, it's harder, it's more stressful. And there was another paper. Yeah, I think that kind of comes into what we often talk about when it comes to behavioural training, which is like we often go like ask an easy question, then a hard question. When they first start on one of these haynets or the treatball, it's actually quite an easy question, but then it gets harder and harder and harder the more they start to use the hay net of the treatball because they've had to work harder. And like we know that like if we're doing training or we're working on something, we start to get fatigue, so it's a lower effort as you go on. But the way we're providing things in that hay net and the bail or treat, it actually is easy, and then it starts to get it gets harder. You know, that's right, it goes that way, so it's easy, and then it gets harder and harder and harder, which increases frustration, and uh you start to get fatigued like completely. So we're gonna get more frustration-based behaviors. Yeah. And then there was another one that was done previous, so this was in 2016, and again, this just agrees with what we know about horse behavior and resource guarding, and was just looked at feeding placement and uh dividers and distance between the forage that you give. So if you're putting out piles of hay or hay nets to reduce conflict between the horses in a social housing environment in a field or in pasture, basically just make sure there's more piles of forage than horse. So you've got three horses in the field, make sure you've got four plus piles of forage. I'd increase the distance between them. Oh, go more, go mouth. If you've got three horses, go five piles, you know. Some yards they'll literally just dump a bale between the bales as well. And if it is ever possible, create barriers between them. So say you have a field or two fields together and there's a hedgerow, put one hay on one field and one hay on the other, and allow the hedgerow to be a physical barrier between the two of them. Because some horses, depending on the social hierarchy and the friendship bonds, sometimes there aren't actually friendship bonds involved, will just find it stressful eating when there's a horse that they don't like watching them. Yeah. And particularly this time of year, like we're kind of in that in between where, you know, if we've had a field as well that has been, you know, grazed down over the winter and we've been able to use it. We're in this bit where the grass is kind of coming through and it's been stressed. And this is when we see more of these behaviors as well, because again, the horses are hungry, they haven't been out as much, we've been restricted turnout to start this conversation and what we actually want to give them. So then it's even more of a valuable resource, and it would be a really natural time of year for horses in a feral situation to resource guard even more because we've got the picker patter of baby hooves on the way. You know, it would be as a we know that this is a difference between resource guarding with mares and geldings. Is that right, Jen? Yeah, we spoke about this in season two about the differences. I think with maybe about the episode about positive enforcement causing horses to bite, which it doesn't, by the way. Don't the sound is awful. It is good. Yeah, I just this is me with my I want a nice crisp sound, Jen. But yes, mares for resource guarding because they're they they need more, it's more important for them to have more resources, you know, if they're expecting or going into ovulation cycles. It makes sense because far far just calories, calories are needed for growing a baby, and they're a full, we should say. That's my excuse to fight David over the last bit of cake. But it is food is more important to the female of a species than it is to the male. The male will find the female is the most important resource because that's what they're programmed to do for reproduction. Because you're pretty much if you're yeah, we'll be now we're gonna get into sex immediate behavior and reproductive behavior and stuff, which is a whole. But no, no, I think it is worth always noting that if you have mixed herds and you're feeding in a mixed species, mixed gender herds, do you take that into consideration in a field and you put out three piles? You might need to put out multiple sites because that mare is going to feel more stressed when you arrive, even if she's not showing it, she's biologically designed to notice that a lot more. But from a biological point of view, also from a grass grassland management, spreading your hay out more across the field does less damage to the grass. Yeah, because you're not restricting it, you're not going to poach one area. I saw one years ago when I was living in Edinburgh, and I loved it. Now, this was a huge field. I was an old stubble field, and you know, they they were basically like using it while they were letting the other fields rest. And they took two bales and they literally rolled the bale the entire way down the field in a big long line, and then did the same on the other one, and it was brilliant because it went the whole stretch of the field, and not only did the horses get to move down the line, but they also got to browse and forage, and it spread it all out along the field and the stubble field. You know, just it was gonna get plowed up, it's gonna get plowed up anyway, you know. So it was it was just perfect, and it kept them all moving and foraging. Exercise is not the same as foraging movement. So horses are designed to take a step eat, take a step eat, slow, methodical, gradual move and munch is not the same as lunging your horse or riding them or jumping them because that's all high stress, high adrenaline, high physical exertion. Your foraging eating is de-stressing, de-escalating behavior, and one does not replace it. So, this is why the foraging that we talked about the enrichment games, the horse can move and forage, grazing in hand, scatter feeding, these slow movement, de-escalating foraging behaviors are so crucial to maintain your horse's mental health. It's not the same, you the the extra the lunging, the loose lunging, the fast work does not replace that slow movement, slow locomotion. And that's really hard to fulfil in the winter. Absolutely, and you know, that's why I love the hack and snack because that does fulfill that. So if you it's a horrible time and you can't get into the arena and you can't do that fast work, and you think, oh, but I want to exercise, and I don't have time to do the foraging one, the hack and snack is such a great one, you know, taking your horse for a hand walk, providing them with opportunities to do a little bit of movement and then stop and then do a bit of grazing and then walk on and then stop and do a bit of grazing. That is the same. It is enriching and it's movement and it's out and about, and you get out as well and spend time with your horse, you know, and you are also being able to do the same kind of training and movement as well, and it's good movement for them. Walk your horse. If you can't hack and snack, and you can't hand graze your horse because they're going mad and jumping all over the place. That's when you contact us. If I'm in Ireland, you contact me in Cheshire, surrounding areas, because that's our job. The hack and snack, yeah. And we'll go from flying a kite to a beautiful hack and snack, and honestly, that has loosely walking. Yeah, loosely walking. Loosely walking for your horse. Best thing you've ever done. Yeah, Jenny, we have a client I worked with years ago, who was you know, bridle, bit, long line, flying a kite, swinging around to go for a hand walk to now in a head collar. And Jitie said to me the other day it was one of her favourite things to do with her. She has adopted the hack and snack, it's one of her favourite things to do with her horse now, which is wonderful because she never would have done it before, and it's amazing. People just really create a bond together. I hate hand grazing. Hand grazing just hurts my back. You're just standing there, you're standing there for hours in the end, where it's actually you know, moving and doing a bit of enrichment, and you get out. I mean, the reason we're horse people as well is the chances are we love being out in nature, like we like being out in the countryside. That is something that we just genuinely enjoy doing. So and we like spending time with our horses, it's a win-win for everybody involved. I'm gonna argue that point. All right, horses living in concrete jungles. You got some cows that you and Reuben get to enjoy together. Oh, yeah, no, we're grand, but I do feel for there are clients that I see, and I really feel for them because to be in grassy areas where there's country lanes and bridleways, but there are parts of this county and area where there's no bridleways, and the only hacking is on roads. There's no grass verges, there's no gateways, there's yards that open up straight onto housing estates and towns. There's multiple ones around here. If we were in Dublin, then yeah, there's a few in Dublin like that, you know, as well. Yeah, it is hard. Do appreciate, but it's literally part of our job to be the outside thinkers, out of the box thinkers for you. For it's our job to pull on all the experiences and the knowledge and the research for you as your as our clients to actually find loopholes and problem solve for you. We don't have to. Somewhere through all there's always creative solutions, ways to do things, and that's half the fun of being able to find solutions. Right, that'll do us. We're nearly at the two-hour mark. I think we kind of covered a little bit of everything. I hope you enjoyed this, uh, guys. I don't know what we're doing for the next one, probably some of the same. Um, if you have anything that you want us to talk about, comments, selections, selections, suggestions, criticisms, give us a message. Um I thought you were going to do your usual criticism, complaint, send them to J. I've already given you your email listener for season three, they wouldn't have known that. Well, no, I'm thinking this is season two. This is just mid-season break. This is still season three. It's a new year. This has to be season three. Season three starts in September. Because it's September when I'm not. You're not doing the editing. This is season two. It's another fight that we record on. I was just gonna do this in season two because only three episodes, there's only like six episodes in season two. Yeah, we've only got six in the next season. More than that. Episodes. So season season one, we went up to eight episodes. Uh season two, we only did four episodes. So we've been on the No, we didn't because we had all the bonuses. No, it doesn't count still season two. Why do the bonuses not count? We launched season one in October 2023, and then we launched season two in July, so it'd be really weird to do season three in March, February. Wow, why would that be weird? The following year, because season two, we've got seven bonus episodes in season two. There's seven bonus episodes. Listen, do you know what? It's not a hill I'm willing to die on. It can be season three. I just want you I just that's it, Barbara. Give up, just do what you guys. I just yeah, it's not a hill I'm willing to die on, and hopefully, hopefully, none of this is recorded and it'll all be null and void anyway. Yeah, so it won't be me crying, it'll be you crying because then you have to set it all up again. I know, I know. Um, but you pressed a button when you shouldn't have. I've actually been very good at not pressing any button. You have on my own screen. Is the apocalypse my own screen, yeah. Yeah, you don't touch that one. But yeah, anyway, I hope you enjoyed this season two or season three, whichever we decide, uh Jen will probably win. New format, a few bits and pieces. I mean, we're never consistent, that's fine. Jen, have you got anything to add? Where can we find you? Oh we'll see for the rest of season three. And if you've got any topics you'd like us to cover. Where can we find you, Jen? You can find me at www.thequine method.co.uk, the equine method on Facebook and Instagram. What about you, Barbs? If you're looking for dogs, it is brighthand.ie. If it's horses, it's brighthorse.ie. And yeah, something on Facebook. I am really an Instagram girl, just copies everything over to Facebook. TikTok, I'm there sometimes. You can email me as well. You can also send stuff on Buzzsprout, I believe. There's messages now. But yeah, that's about it. We're really bad at plugs. Send all your complaints to BuzzSprout. Uh yeah, because we won't read them. We won't read them at all. Abrupt. Yeah, it's gonna happen. I don't know how to hang up. You can't believe no, you don't don't touch anything. Remember, those are the rules. You're not allowed to touch anything. I will stop the recording. They can see the video. All right, now I'm gonna stop. Perfect.