I'm Gemma Pearson. I'm one of the resident equine vets here at the Dick Vet Equine Hospital. And my main interests are equine behavior and equine medicine. Horses are very basic creatures generally. They want to be able to socialize with other horses, they want to be able to be free to move around, and obviously they need to be kept in a reasonable environment and with reasonable feeding. So their diet, they're designed to eat hay, haylage, and grass. They're not designed to eat a lot of the concentrated feeds that people seem to give them a lot of nowadays. From a veterinary viewpoint, one of the biggest problems we see is obesity in horses. A lot of people think that horses should look a little bit rounder than they actually do. As you know, one of my interests is equine behavior. And I think we see a lot of welfare problems in that aspect, simply because people don't understand truly how horses learn. And from that, they're unable to train horses effectively. So they resort to using bigger bits, spurs, different gadgets and things for control or for improved performance. Whereas if they understand how horses learn a little bit better, they can change the training methods to accompany that. What's really important to horses is that whenever you put pressure on them, whenever they give you the right response, you should then release that pressure. And if you do that then horses will respond to lighter and lighter pressures, and we'll never need bigger bits or bigger spurs or martingales to tie the head down. If, on the other hand, the pressure's never released when these horses give the correct response, then eventually you end up using increased pressures. From a physical point of view, you can actually see pain and bruising and lacerations and things inflicted through harsher bits, through increased spur pressure on the horses side if they've been habituated to light pressure. We will also see horses that are in discomfort because of restrictive tack. But then also from a psychological view, we'll see horses which show stress levels, perhaps increased cortisol which is a stress hormone, simply because they have some confusions in their ridden work. Horses are designed to move, they're not designed to be confined within a stable. And it wouldn't be acceptable nowadays to keep a rabbit in a very small hutch or a dog in a very small kennel and only take the dog out for a 10 or 15 or 20 minute walk each day. Whereas with horses we do still see this with some horses. So I think it's important that horses are allowed to exercise and socialize freely. Certainly in the UK, most people want to look after the horses really well nowadays. And sometimes we almost care too much, dare I say it. So certainly in the instance of obesity, if we want to say that I want to say thank you for doing something, I'll often take you out for a meal. We like to reward people with food, and we do the same with horses. [SOUND] We also see examples of where horses will whinny, they get quite excited if some one brings them food, so people often see that as horses loving them if they give them food. I think we also want to treat horses like humans. So, as you're aware, we live here in Scotland, it's quite cold, and I can think of nothing nicer in the winter than being tucked up in my house with a nice big fleece jumper on and being nice and warm. Whereas horses are not designed like that. A horse would much rather be out in a field somewhere. No, I understand there are some horses which are a bit older or thinner or whatever that might not want to be out there in the driving rain the whole time. But, for the most part, horses don't mind cold weather like we do, and they usually don't need as many rooks as people want to put on them. I think understand that horses are meant to be horses. Try and look at how horses are designed to live in their natural environment, and try to mimic that as much as is reasonably possible. And then, please try and have some understand as to how horses learn and think about how we can incorporate that into their training.
