The word "happiness" may seem subjective, but it is a reality ethological precise.

Like any organism, animal or human, the horse in his nervous system has a repertoire of biological functions that enable it to live. These are the functions of recovery, subsistence, and related backup.

In that order, they are implementing increasingly nervous tension, stress-inducing. Each function is scheduled to speak at a certain "volume" which is the normal daily requirement of the species in the environment that shaped their genetic programs (that is to say the steppe).

For example, to ingest some sixty kilos of grass that make up his meal, he must give for twelve to fifteen hours a day about ten thousand rounds of jaws. This number is fixed for a given horse. If he can use them by eating a food like grass very dilute, the nervous tension is gradually lowered along drains the nervous energy stored to perform this function: one can say he is happy. But if he can not use them, because his power is concentrated granules swallowed two or three miles chews, it will first attempt to drift into another object, it will eat away the stall door, and finally will scratch develop visible disease as "tic aérophagique" or less visible as a tendency to colic or lower immune defenses.
It will be the same for the four functions which we have spoken and which allow the horse to live his life from his horse, in which man was not genetically planned ...

Let us sum up: if the horse is easy to evacuate the nervous energy of his genetic behavioral programs (food with his jaw movements, locomotion with four to ten miles a day, etc ...), it will be constantly at a voltage level very low which is called the "Field Relaxed" and we can say that he is "happy."
If the environment is so artificial and inappropriate that it can evacuate its nervous energy for different functions, it will rise in voltage above the level of backup to a very high stress levels by blocking its function (s inhibition of the coherent action "). Disorders visible or not visible will grow, reversible and irreversible first, and we can say without doubt that this horse is "unfortunate".

The horse lives in boxes, which feels safe, which has social contact with other horses (sniffing, scratching each other, etc ...), which is four to ten kilometers per day, which requires a sufficient supply time to be ingested, which can lie on a bed and dream, then this horse may be perfectly "happy" because each of its activities will start its "neural circuits of reward" that drive the state of "happy ".
Certainly, freedom in nature is best suited to its programs but it will be better box with conspecifics than alone in a meadow. However, in box, let us beware of so satisfy his needs he lost the will to live and become neurotic! He also needs to make some effort! This too is expected in a program: "appetitive behavior".

One last point it is interesting to note: the fashion of the masters of all kinds and methods of their miracles is not always in the sense of "happiness" of the horse. Manipulation of the foal too early whose attachment to the mother is not complete (fifteen days to three weeks) will necessarily have emotional disturbances, and "soft" methods of stripping accelerated, not involving learning by "habituation," operate by "mount" the horse in action inhibition, which is the ultimate degree of emotional abuse, all the more dangerous it is not visible.

But, that said, if the horse and man had not made a covenant, there would probably more horses on earth ...

Jean-Claude Barrey

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