Listen Up: Select Sounds May Settle Stalled Horses

Similar to humans, horses may relax more readily when listening to sounds of nature like chirping birds, running water or blowing leaves on trees. This is of particular importance for stalled horses, who often paw, kick, weave or crib as a way to show their frustration with being confined, reports The Horse.

A study examining the effect of sounds played for stalled horses was presented by undergraduate student Chloe Bolanos at the Conference of the International Society for Equitation Science in Cambridge, New Zealand.

Bolanos and a team of researchers exposed six Warmbloods to pre-recorded jazz, country, classical music, lullabies, or nature sounds. None of the music had vocals. The music was played and the horses observed for one hour twice a day for two weeks. The scientists measured how much of the time the horses spent foraging, interacting with horses in other stalls, showing frustration or exhibiting other abnormal behaviors.

The horses heard one of the five sounds randomly each day and had no sounds played on the first and last days of the study.

The team found that the horses showed frustration behaviors more than twice as often when listening to jazz music than when no music played at all. All other recorded sounds elicited no change in frustration behavior than when they had no sound enrichment.

Horses foraged 15 percent more when nature sounds were played than when no sound was played. Horses showed less frustration on the last day of the study, when no sound was played, than they did on the first day.

The research team concludes that two weeks of any sound enrichment may improve the welfare of stalled horses.

Read more at The Horse.