I think it is fairly obvious to almost everyone that horses are not machines. They have physical, mental, and emotional sides that make up their personality, behaviour, trainability, and ability to negotiate life. They are not simple animals. They are complex.
Horses have a sophisticated central nervous system. I have said many times that a horse is essentially a brain with four legs. Yes, that’s an oversimplification but it is also not wrong.
In past articles on this page, I have compared human conditions with equine ones and asked if there is a commonality. I have questioned if horses can suffer from migraine headaches or menstrual pain or muscle cramps and are never detected.
Lately, I have been thinking about neurological traits in horses that might go unrecognized.
Can a horse suffer chronic depression? Can they experience schizophrenia? What about paranoia or autism?
It’s easy to dismiss the possibility of these things because nobody ( at least nobody I know) talks about it or even thinks about it.
I don’t know the answer to these questions and a search of the internet did not provide any answers. But how would it alter our understanding and the practice of horsemanship if we had some insight into the chronic mental health of horses?
I believe I have observed in a couple of horses what appears to be grief. The signs have been consistent with what I have observed as grief in people. But I don’t really know if it was grief. It may be just a misinterpretation of a change in a horse's behaviour stemming from my need to explain it. But I was never able to get rid of the idea that what I observed was a horse suffering grief.
A few years ago I wrote a post asking how we would alter our approach to training if our horses could cry. The idea behind the question was to wake people up to the notion that horses can’t cry, so instead they buck or are hard to catch or swish their tail when we ride. We see these as training issues that need fixing.
But what if instead of our horse telling us it is unhappy by bucking, it told us it was unhappy by crying? Would that change how we train? Instead of addressing the bucking problem by disengaging the hindquarters or driving the horse forward, we took a different approach as if our horse were crying from a mental/emotional problem. Maybe make it a cup of tea and have it sit on the couch why it told us how it felt that the other horses wouldn’t let it play with them.
There are no answers here, only questions. We don't know if horses can suffer mental health problems. But we don't know that they can't either.
Nevertheless, I believe it would not be time wasted to consider if a horse you know has a chronic mental or emotional problem, not a training problem. How would you work with a horse with depression or autism? How would you work with a horse that could cry?
