There are over 100 million horses, donkeys and mules in the world today and owners of these animals can be found on almost every continent and in almost every society. The Horse Course will cover many unique aspects of equine ownership and touch upon the science behind many of today’s management practices.
How Horses and Donkeys Communicate
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From the course by University of Florida
The Horse Course: Introduction to Basic Care and Management
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From the lesson
Equine Behavior and Training
The topics this week will focus on equid behavior and movement. Understanding how equids relate to their environment and communicate is critical to training and management. We will start this week by examining the basic equine senses and communication. Then we will discuss normal and abnormal behaviors and the basic psychology used in training. We will finish the week discussing the basic gaits and how these animals move.
Meet the Instructors
Chris J. Mortensen, Ph.D.Professor
Animal Sciences
All right, welcome back and in this lecture we're gonna talk about how horses,
donkeys communicate.
This can apply to the other equids too,
the mules and the zebras to an extent, too.
Again, starting off with what we started off with in the last lecture, and
that's how horses have evolved to have this environmental awareness,
situational awareness, always constantly aware of their surroundings.
And it's important for us that work with these animals to understand that and
to understand their behaviors, so
we can understand how best to train them and how best work safely around them.
And then if you look at these two horses,
which is really kinda cool in the difference in alert.
Obviously this horse is alert, okay.
This horse is alert but
also seems to be a little bit alarmed if you look at its eyes.
Now we know they're alert because both have their ears pricked forward and
you look at the eyes, the eyes are really wide.
And to me that is a sense of alarm that this horse does not want his picture being
taken and it's showing this guy, do not not take my picture.
Obviously, whoever's standing there, that horse does not like what's going on and
it could be maybe not so much the picture taking but what's in his hand and
kind of seeing that as a threat.
Now again, they're using all these senses all the time to
gather all this information.
All the time smelling, looking, feeling, tasting, is everything safe?
Is this good to eat?
And it's just basic daily life.
And a lot of it just becomes second nature.
Obviously similar to our own behavior.
Now, after that review, I kind of start this lecture off with safety.
Safety to me is one of the most critical aspects of horse ownership,
donkey ownership.
Anytime you're around these animals you really need to be safe
because yes they're much larger than us.
They weigh five times our weight,
sometimes way more than that with certain animals.
And they can hurt us either indirectly or directly.
So they're wonderful animals to work with.
The majority of the time, most of the animals are not out to hurt us.
They're just reacting to a stimulus, so.
That's why we talk about learning to interpret a horse's
body language as being important because that's the only way we can communicate.
I can't speak to my horse in English, I can try, and
they'll respond to my pitch and amplitude, but not the words.
And it's important to be able to read what they're saying back.
So some of this, like in that last picture I showed you,
here is a horse with a really wide eye.
Obviously alarmed, and maybe a little bit agitated,
just still like whoa what's going on.
And then this horse here is in a pretty relaxed state.
Eyes closed, ears just kinda resting a little back, and
just enjoying the outdoors, and maybe taking a little bit of a snooze.
Now it's also important to remember with any of these animals, or any animal for
that matter is their behavior can change in an instant.
So even though this horse here is relaxed, it can turn to this really
quick like especially if I came up behind it and popped a balloon,
it would scare the heck out of it and it would become alarmed instantly.
So always be aware of that.
So you're always a little bit cautious doing that.
Now this is showing you a video that I took at
White Oak which is a conservation center up here in Florida that works really,
really hard on the conservation of endangered species.
And in this video, it's looping, is a Somali wild ass, and this is a jenny and
she's pregnant at this point when I took this video, and
she is reacting to our presence there cuz we just set up, and so she's alert and you
can see she's standing there swishing her tail a little bit and looking right at us.
Now, off to our right there must've been another vehicle coming by or
she saw something, so she turns her head, looks there, and then decides, later on in
the video she decided we weren't a threat and she went back to what she was doing.
So, that's kind of what they look like when they're alert.
Now here's another observation time, much later,
because now we have foals on the ground, and this almost looks like a picture.
Now if you watch the foal's ears, they will move a little bit.
So you know it's a video, but here and there's a car that just went by, so
you can see that.
But here in this video you can see that jenny is resting.
And she's standing up tall and two foals are in the foreground and
they're resting too.
So this is a relaxed animal, not alert, relaxed in its environment.
Now, one way to always read a horse's mood is their ear position and
some people say it's their barometer of a horse's mood.
And in these images you can see the three images.
Here's a horse that I would say is relaxed.
Eyes halfway closed, ears just kinda resting back.
And this animal is relaxed.
Now the ears pricked forward, this isn't an alert.
This horse isn't alert, it's actually curious and is investigating.
It's probably investigating the camera that's taking its picture.
And it's reaching its nose out so it can take a sniff.
It's listening, are you in danger, eyes forward.
Now this is what you need to really be aware of, and
this is ears pinned back, and that's when the ears aren't facing back,
but pinned back, back down almost along their neck.
That is an agitated animal, that's an angry animal.
And you have to be cautious because they can either reach out and bite you, or
they can turn and kick you, especially if they perceive you as a threat.
So if you see that, either stop what you're doing,
figure out the stimulus that's doing this to that animal, or back away.
I mean, there are horses,
and it's rare, but there are horses that can be really difficult to handle, and
they get angry and you've gotta be careful and cautious when working with them.
Now in this video, it's one of my favorite videos, if you look at the left,
you can see two of the foals and then the third one comes in, and
they are gonna all gonna try to nurse on this jenny.
And you can see what she's gonna do.
Keep watching that video.
Right there.
She pins her ears, and she says nope.
I cannot nurse all three of you.
I don't wanna nurse all three of you.
I've got my own foal.
I don't want any other foals.
You guys leave me alone.
Now what's so great about this is she doesn't reprimand the foals.
She doesn't nip them, she doesn't bite them.
She just subtly says no.
And then she gets out of the way, she walks off.
She's like okay, I'm out of here, you guys leave me alone go find your own mommas and
that's how they are.
I mean that's,
it's amazing to watch their behaviour especially their social behaviour.
So really one of the cooler videos showing subtle kind of alert alarm,
how they use behaviour to indicate activity.
Now other things that they can do is obviously the health of an animal, or
if they're excited and what they're running around, their current activity.
One of the things, especially when we get to health,
we'll talk about if you come across your horse or
your animal that's just very lethargic, it's not acting itself.
It's on the ground.
If it's colicky, which we'll get to in nutrition a little bit,
which is a digestive disturbance.
And they roll, and roll, and roll, and they're in a lot of pain, really sweaty.
Anything that is abnormal from
what you normally see in your animal, obviously, something's wrong.
And that's where you wanna get a hold of your veterinarian or
try to diagnose what's going on with your animal to see if you can help them.
Now, this next section we're gonna talk about is some of the auditory or
how they communicate using horse voice or different sounds that they make.
Now the non-vocal are just normal daily noises they make.
They're gonna snore,
they'll cough, walking they make noises with the clanking of the hooves.
So those are just normal, daily sounds.
Again, kind of what we just talked about in that previous slide, let's say,
they may cough every now and then but if they're coughing a lot or blowing or
snorting a lot, they could have an airway obstruction, they could be getting sick,
they could have a parasite infection, so some of these non-vocal sounds, if they're
kind of abnormal or abnormal frequency you wanna check the animal's health.
Now if just wanna hear one of them, so here's an example of a blow,
I'm gonna play this a couple times so you can hear it and
really see what these non-vocal sounds are.
[SOUND] Okay, and that's just a horse blowing, and they do this every so often.
Especially when I'm walking horses in barns and just, the barn amplifies it.
So I'm gonna play it one more time [SOUND] and that's an example of a blow.
Okay, now we're gonna go into the vocalizations, these vocal sounds and
I'm gonna kind of give you an example of each one of these.
The most everybody likes or associates with horses, a neigh or
maybe called a whinny and this is just one that they use in greeting,
either greeting us which they will neigh at us quite a bit,
especially when they get to know you or you know, each other.
And to give you an example, here's what a neigh is.
It starts at a high pitch and then kind of goes down to a lower pitch.
[SOUND] Okay, one more time.
[SOUND] And you can hear that and that's a neigh.
Now the other type of vocalization which is really cool and
sometimes it's really subtle.
So, you gotta really kinda listen for it.
But again, is the nicker, which is another greeting.
And you hear this quite a bit.
Especially with mares and foals or a mare that just foaled.
I mean, you hear it all the time.
It's pretty amazing, the interaction when you see that.
So to give you an example, here's a couple of examples.
[SOUND] Okay, that's the nicker.
I'll play it again.
[SOUND] Okay, you can see it's kind of subtle, it's not real loud.
And again, that's a greeting, so it's a positive interaction.
Now a snort is again, a vocalization that's kinda meeting a new horse.
And it's maybe establishing dominance like hey, this is my house.
Be careful.
So if you can hear a snort.
This is what a snort is.
[SOUND] Okay, a really short [SOUND].
You can hear that really short burst.
Now play that again.
[SOUND] Okay, so that's the snort.
And then the roar is a little bit more aggressive.
So again, this is when establishing dominance.
So here's your example.
[SOUND] Play it again.
[SOUND] That's really quick, so I'll do it one more time.
[SOUND] That's kind of a roar.
And then it almost sound like a little nicker at the end, like hey, okay.
Now this one you,
especially this one's the one you hear a lot when you're working around a farm.
And the most often where I hear this is when we have two buddies in a paddock or
in the pasture together.
And you need to take one buddy to go either groom or you're gonna go ride, or
whatever.
And you actually have to leave the other buddy behind and
you can hear them all the way across the farm, just screaming at each other, and
it's really distress and anxiety.
So, not something you really wanna hear, but
you do hear it quite often especially working around horses quite a bit.
So here's an example, [SOUND] okay, and
you may hear this like a horse walking into a barn for the first time.
Again, it's anxiety.
[SOUND] Okay, and that's a scream.
All right and then for the donkeys, this is my
favorite sound of this whole lecture, I really had fun finding this one,
is the bray and the bray can mean a lot of different things.
It can be a greeting, they can use it really loud, a sign of distress.
In the wild they use this to, especially they're in these desert regions
where they can contact each other, find out where they're at.
So here's what a bray sounds like,
and this one's a little
bit longer so, [SOUND].
That one cracks me up.
All right one more time, [SOUND].
Just hearing that makes me wanna go pet them and
say it's okay, it's okay.
But anyway, that's sound donkeys or mules make.
Now some of the other types of communication,
we've talked a little bit about this, especially with touching, nuzzling.
Again, this is establishing social contacts or
they're reinforcing social bonds, so they do that quite a bit.
And then there's a thing called allogrooming.
I don't know if you've heard this before or not, but this is where the horses
lineup parallel to each other as you can see here in this visual image, and
they're opposite, and they just start nibbling on each other's coats, and
they're grooming, and any bugs or ticks or
anything like that they will crunch with their teeth or knock off.
And you see this a lot with social reinforcement.
Two buddies hey, grooming each other, that's really a show of almost affection.
And then, we've talked a little bit about the foals,
I showed you that video of the foals playing and fighting.
Really, really important for the youngster's social development.
So they wanna be playing, they wanna be fighting,
they have to learn what's appropriate and what's not appropriate in the horse world.
So that's where they learn this.
And then you'll see quite often with greeting, nose-to-nose or
nose-to-genital, especially with stallions and mares.
Hey, are you in season?
And we'll get more into reproductive behaviors at the end of week six or
the end of the course.
So they do do that, it is normal behavior.
That's why we talk about it.
And then, I've already briefly, little bit during the senses talk, talked about
the flehmen response, and this is again them drawing those smells into that
large nasal cavity to where those chemoreceptors can read those signals.
And you most see this with stallions and mares.
He's sniffing her urine to see if she's in heat or ready to be bred.
And this response is not particular to the equids.
So actually here's a tiger doing the Flehmen response for them.
So other species do this too with their really highly developed sense of smell.
And then the other things that they'll be smelling for,
they will smell feces or urine, saliva, breath odor,
skin secretions, and maybe checking the health status or something like that.
Like hey, what are you eating that I'm not.
So they do do that, and they do communicate that way.
All right, so that's just kind of an overview of how they communicate.
You can go back and watch those videos again, or play those sounds over and
over to figure out what they're saying.
In our next lecture, we're gonna talk about their typical behaviors, and
really what an equid or a horse does during each day.
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