The Ethology and Evolution of the Horse

Before addressing individual equine learning and living experiences, I want to give an overview of the nature of the horse and the methods of behavioural biology. Horses behave more or less the same way today as their ancestors have always done, in the ways which have proved most useful in nature. Even domestication by man has not been able to change this. Ethology, the science of behaviour, can help us understand the horse's needs better and to participate in its experiential world. For this purpose we have to consider our means of influencing the horse, as well as its natural potential: Every horse is a unique individual, a product of its genetic heritage as well as its environment. Horses are born with certain behaviours, while others are acquired through life experiences. Behavioural science sums this construct up in the term 'nature and nurture', making it clear that both areas have a significant influence on the horse's personality.

What is Behaviour?

At first sight, the question might seem trivial – however, 'behaviour' is a central term and actually quite difficult to define, as it has many levels of interpretation. A grazing horse is exhibiting a behavioural pattern every bit as complex as a horse that is galloping, playing, or doing the piaffe. Such activities are always compounds of a variety of interacting mechanisms, and when evaluating a behaviour, all observable physical activities should be taken into consideration. Depending on the complexity of the behaviour, there may be an incredibly large number of physical features and changes. Take the example of the walk, for instance: how are the individual limbs moving, precisely? What is the rest of the body doing? Have you really considered every part of the body, all the muscles, and the surface of the skin? What breathing frequency can be observed? What is the expression of the eyes? In addition, we can describe the presumed purpose of the horse's actions. Where is it going? What does its facial expression say? Many interpretive elements are entering the equation here. It is the question 'Why?' that especially represents one of the central issues in behavioural science, and it can be answered on many very different levels.

Tinbergen's Questions

Nikolaas Tinbergen is considered one of the foremost behavioural scientists of the 20th century. Together with Konrad Lorenz and Karl von Frisch, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1973. Tinbergen developed the dominant theory of modern behavioural biology, which became known as '„Tinbergen's Questions', and which deals with the causes, functions, individual development, as well as the evolutionary development of behaviour. According to this elementary theory, there are four essentially equally important levels of answering any question we can ask about a horse's behaviour: causality, functionality, individual development and collective evolutionary development.

Let's take the example of a spooky horse, and answer Tinbergen's questions:

• The question of causality. You can initially answer this question on the level of the direct, immediate cause. A horse spooks because it has sensitive sensory organs that can send nervous impulses to the brain very quickly and lead to an immediate reaction.

• The question of functionality. Spooking gives our horse an acute survival advantage. It is able to react immediately to potential dangers and to protect its own life through flight.

• Spooking therefore fulfils a function that is necessary for survival in the horse's natural environment.

• The question of the individual development. Every horse will have observed the important ability to spook in its own individual developmental history, its life story, by observing its mother and other herd members, and will have learned this behaviour to an individually varying degree.

• The question of the collective evolutionary development. Spooking has furthermore proven to be an elementary behaviour in the horse's evolutionary development. For millions of years, the ancestors of our modern horses had to evade dangerous predators. Our modern horses are thus the direct descendants of extremely spooky quadrupeds that were able to ensure their survival as a species based on this behavioural structure. We should always keep this in the back of our mind when we complain about the excessive spookiness of our horses, or when we make fun of it.

Instincts in Horses

You could translate the term 'instinct' literally as 'natural urge'. An instinct refers to the inner, unknown impulses behind an animal's behaviour that an observer can witness. Colloquially, we call behaviour 'instinctive' when it happens spontaneously, 'from the gut', without conscious deliberation. For many years, behavioural science was based on what is called instinct theory: an instinctual movement was supposed to be the result of an animal's spontaneously arising inner readiness to act, which is triggered by a key stimulus once it reaches a specific stimulation threshold. In the widest sense, we understand instinctive behaviour to mean the horse's typical, innate behaviour. By today's scientific standards this view is outdated, as these simple basic assumptions cannot stand up to the new neurobiological explanatory models. A horse acts in much more complex ways and has to be considered a personality, not an 'instinct machine'. The assumption that horses always act according to a simple stimulusreaction principle neglects the fact that every behaviour consists of the interaction between emotional states, previous individual experiences, and conscious thought processes, as well as the individual, highly specific situation.

Ethology and Psychology Go Hand in Hand

Until the 1960s, only the 'nature' aspect of the 'nature and nurture' combination was considered relevant to classical horse researchers. They predominantly studied horses in their natural environment and presented their arguments mainly from the point of view of evolutionary history. It was only with the incorporation of the innovative approach of psychology, which focuses on the 'nurture' aspect by researching the development of individual behaviour and the learning processes, that a new dynamic entered equine ethology.

In modern behavioural biology these two explanatory models are now inseparably interwoven, in order to be able to grasp the horse's behavioural repertoire in its totality. Every sentient being's personality represents the sum of innate and learned elements, which interact constantly. For instance, the innate behaviour of a foal triggers a certain behavioural response from the mother, from which the foal in turn learns something which informs his future behaviour.

Modern equine researchers speak of a model of 'nature via nurture'. There are genetic traits that are switched on only after the individual has had the appropriate experiences. Both horses and humans, for example, are born with the ability to see, being equipped with eyes and the necessary nervous system. But if the exterior stimuli were missing, if we grew up in complete darkness, our vision would never develop. We would be functionally blind, although born with all the physical...