Primeira parte de um artigo desenvolvido exclusivamente para o Blog pela Dra. Chiara Scopa e pelo Dr. Paolo Baragli, cientistas internacionais do departamento de Ciências Veterinárias da Universidade de Pisa na Itália que são especialistas em comportamento e bem-estar de cavalos. 

 

1. ‘Doing well’: the science of animal welfare

When we observe our animal’s behavior we feel like we are at one with him/her enough to understand how he/she feels or what he/she needs in a particular situation, environment or time of the day. Despite this, they cannot talk to us and only a careful read-through of the animal’s behavior can unveil how he/she really feels. Improving life conditions of living beings is a form of natural instinct in many animal species and humans eventually conceived a science that aims at meliorate other animals lives (in terms of health care, social networks, housing condition) . The science we are talking about is animal welfare. Evaluating the welfare of an animal means assessing how much his/her behavior lines up with the behavior of another individual of the same species; the more the domestic individual behaves like the feral one, the more the first is living a ‘natural’ life.

What is ‘natural’ for horses? Behaving natural means that one individual is performing all those behaviors which are typical of horses. How much one horse does a horse, is called ‘horseness’. Are horses being managed in a manner that allows them to express in many of their natural behaviors? (Heleski & Anthony, 2012) That’s the question anyone who owns a horse should ask himself.

By the term ‘natural’ Spinka (2006) defined those behavioral elements and their sequences that are adaptive, i.e. that have evolved either during the evolution of the species or during its domestication with the purpose of increasing the fitness of the species. Natural behavior does not fit in a standardized, fixed concept. Even if some elements may be performed in the same modality during the lifetime or between individuals (as for ritualized movements, cfr play bow in dogs), they include a percentage of plasticity in the form, in the duration or the intensity since they are bound not only with the evolutionary history of the species, but also with the emotional state of the individual, its cognitive properties and the stimuli coming from the environment.

The cognitive processes include those mechanisms through which individuals may detect and learn a stimulus by senses, and choose to act on it; therefore, broadly speaking, cognitive processes concept embraces perception, learning, memory and decision making mechanisms. From this definition by Shettleworth (2001) it appears clear how different levels of information processing may have co-evolved in order to make the individual aware about the environment (in particular using perception and learning abilities). Hence, to truly understand how our horse is doing ‘at home’, we should know first how he/she collects the representative information on his/her surrounding environment. Fraser and collaborators (1997) stated that ‘‘animal welfare can be viewed as a ‘bridging’ concept that links scientific research to the ethical concerns that the research is intended to address’’. In deciding whether a horse’s welfare is threatened, working with animals should be integrated with explicit biological facts.

 

REFERENCES:

Fraser, D., Weary, D. M., Pajor, E. A., & Milligan, B. N. 1997 A scientific conception of animal welfare that reflects ethical concerns. Animal welfare 6, 187-205

Heleski, C. R.& Anthony, R. 2012 Science alone is not always enough: The
importance of ethical assessment for a more comprehensive view of equine welfare. Journal of Veterinary Behavior 7, 169-178

Shettleworth, S. J. 2001 Animal cognition and animal behaviour. Animal Behaviour 61, 277–286

Spinka, M. 2006 How important is natural behaviour in animal farming systems? Applied Animal Behaviour Science 100, 117–128