I moved into summerstock housing tonight and a friendly orange cat immediately greeted my kitties to the neighborhood (he actually climbed into my damn car).Â
But then when I stepped into my apartment building I found this:
if u ever find a genie and youâre really craving a dessert that looks like this:
do NOT say âiâd like a lifetime supply of raspberry crownsâ
while this is, in fact, the name of the pastry, itâs ALSO the name of a species of wasp for some reason. the genie, being a nasty trickster, will no doubt give you a bunch of wasps.
At this stage researchers can't say whether one position is better or worse, however. Thatâs especially true when it comes to training, they said.
TheHorse.com | 4 May, 2018
Equitation scientists believe humans should not train horses through dominance. And recent study results suggest horses canâand doâdistinguish between dominant and submissive postures in humans.
Guess which one they prefer?
Submissive postures, hands down, said Leanne Proops, PhD, who conducted a study on the topic with colleagues from the University of Sussex Mammal Vocal Communication and Cognition Research group and the University of Portsmouth, both in the U.K.
But Proops said sheâs careful not to suggest that her study proves we should show âdominanceâ or âsubmissivenessâ when working with our horses. Rather, she said, it proves something even more critical: that horses pick up on the difference.
âHorses are keenly tuned in to our body language all the time, as our study underlines,â Proops said. âIf we are sensitive to the messages we communicate with our body language and pay attention to how horses respond to these cues, this in itself will help us to establish good relationships with our horses.â
In their study, Proops and her fellow researchers designed a test for 30 riding horses focusing specifically on dominant or submissive posture in humans. To do so, they had to eliminate all other factors that might influence the horses. So they worked with 10 female handlers, all about the same size and body shape and all dressed alike in jeans and dark jackets. They also all wore black neck warmers up to above their noses to mask as many facial expressions as possible. The horses did not know these women prior to the experiment.
They first had each individual horse go into an arena with two of these women standing neutrally, facing each other, ignoring the horse, and holding a carrot. That way, Proops said, the horse would have some kind of motivation to approach the humans in the second part of the experiment.
Once the horse understood he might get a carrot from one of these women, the researchers started Phase 2. In this phase, two of the women stood a few feet apart from each other. One would take on a âdominantâ posture: standing tall with legs shoulder-length apart, arms held out to the side, and chest puffed out. The other would take on a âsubmissiveâ posture: legs together, crouching slightly, arms tucked in. A third handler would release the horse into the arena. Once it approached one of the two women, the third handler would lead the horse away, walk it in a figure-eight (to reduce the chance that the horse starts to prefer the human on one side or another, as previous research has shown), and release it again.
To reduce the chance that a horse preferred a single handler, the women switched places, sides, and postures several times throughout the study.
The researchers found that, across the board, the horses showed a strong preference for submissive handlers, Proops said. They approached them more frequently, and not a single horse in the group showed an overall preference for the dominant handler.
âIt could be that submissive individuals are less threatening, and so it would be less risky to approach a submissive than a dominant individual, particularly in the context of food provision,â Proops said.
In other situations, however, itâs possible that horses might react differently, she added.
âIt is highly likely that horses (and other species) prefer to be in the company of submissive individuals in some contexts and dominant individuals in others,â she said. âFor example, horses may avoid eating in close proximity to dominant individuals for fear of aggression, but they may choose to be near dominant individuals when their group is threatened by another group. Studies have also shown that horses learn more readily from dominant group members, for example.â
Hence, at this stage, itâs impossible to say whether one position is âbetterâ or âworseâ than the other, based on the study results. And thatâs especially true when it comes to training.
âSuccessful relationships between horses and people are likely to depend on the context and the individuals involved,â Proops said. âAnd there is a big difference between showing confidence, being dominant, or being threatening.
âWe canât be sure how the horses in our study interpreted the dominant posture of the unknown people in our study, but it may be that different results are seen when familiar people or different contexts are used,â she continued. âIt would be interesting to find out.â
The study, âDomestic horses (Equus caballus) prefer to approach humans displaying a submissive body posture rather than a dominant body posture,â was published in Animal Cognition.
Hi, Iâm here to ruin your day by informing you that wild horses donât exist.Â
Until now, it had been thought that the Przewalskiâs horse, or takhi, was the last living horse that had never been domesticated. However, new genetic evidence suggests that they are actually descendants of domestic, currently extinct, and sometimes appaloosa-spotted Botai horses.Â
That means that âthe last wild horsesâ arenât wild at all, but feral.Â
(photo via Laika ac on Flickr, reconstruction by Ludovic Orlando, Seas Goddard and Alan Outram)
Summarising the actual article in somewhat more detail, the researchers compared the genomes of twenty horses from the Botai culture in Kazakhstan (flourished c. 3700-3100 B.C.) with those of a variety of horses, some ancient, some modern, including the Przewalskiâs Horse. Botai is connected with three main sites, Botai, Krasnyi Yar, and Vasilkovka; Botai and Krasnyi Yar are the two mentioned in this study. It was an Aeneolithic culture (Chalcolithic, Copper Age, it has many names). Evidence for the presence of domesticated horses in Botai is discussed in Outram et al. 2009, from damage to tooth enamel consistent with bitting, to a more slender build comparable to that of domesticated horses in Bronze Age Kent.
Significantly, the researchers included the genomes of five domestic horses from Borly 4, an Aeneolithic site, also in Kazakhstan, that is dated to c. 3000 B.C. (I am simplifying grossly here, largely because I donât read Russian.) They also had, in addition to six modern Przewalskiâs Horses, the genome of one from the nineteenth century, predating the collapse of their population in the twentieth century. Finally, they included the genomes of three wild horses, two from the Taymyr Peninsula, Siberia, and one from Batagai, Siberia. The Taymyr horses were radiocarbon dated to the Late Pleistocene (Schubert et al. 2014), so definitively pre-domestication (weâre talking 40 000 B.C. and 14 000 B.C. respectively), and the Batagai horse to c. 3000 B.C. (Librado et al. 2015).Â
What Gaunitz et al. found in their study was that the Botai horses were unrelated to these three genuinely wild horses, and also to modern domestic horses, including Mongolian horses, the Jeju, and the Yakut. In other words, modern domestic horses do not descend from the horses at Botai. However, the Borly 4 horses clustered together with the Botai horses, and the Przewalskiâs Horses were genetically a subset of the the Borly 4 horses.Â
Now, given that modern Przewalskiâs Horses descend from just nine individuals, two of which were hybrids, obviously a good deal of their original genetic diversity has been lost. However, the one specimen from the nineteenth century descends from the Borly 4 horses, which is significant inasmuch as it predates the genetic bottleneck of the Przewalskiâs Horse. Of course, it is only one horse, and I feel that a larger sample of pre-twentieth century Przewalskiâs Horses would need to be tested, in order to state with confidence that Przewalskiâs Horse as a whole descends from the domesticated Borly 4 and Botai horses, but I am no geneticist. Â
Also, the claim that the Bortai horses were all spotted is nonsense, as only one of the five had the ancestral PATN1 allele. So that bad Photoshop should be doubly ashamed of itself.
For those interested in the details, the tests used to establish relatedness were outgroup f3 statistics (this tests shared genetic drift between test groups and an outgroup, which is a reference group supposed to have split from the test groupsâ populations before the test groups split from each other) and D-statistics (which test for admixture and can indicate the direction of gene flow as well; it was originally used to test whether modern humans have Neanderthal ancestry).Â
References
Gaunitz et al. 2018. âAncient genomes revisit the ancestry of domestic and Przewalskiâs horsesâ. Science.Â
Librado et al. 2015. âTracking the origins of Yakutian horses and the genetic basis for their fast adaptation to subarctic environmentsâ. PNAS.
Outram et al. 2009. âThe Earliest Horse Harnessing and Milkingâ. Science.Â
Schubert et al. 2014. âPrehistoric genomes reveal the genetic foundation and cost of horse domesticationâ. PNAS.
and if you want to understand the statistics,
Patterson et al. 2012. âAncient Admixture in Human Historyâ. Genetics.
Relevant extracts from the Gaunitz et al. article below.Â
What a wonderful breakdown! To add another pop-news article, I felt NPRâs write-up, at least to me, was clearer: Why the Last âWildâ Horses Really Arenât
What she means: the equine industry is so screwed up like we all start riding because we love horses but towards the middle of it people start excusing drugging horses and overjumping them and âmaintenanceâ to keep them going and showing even at the risk of the deteriorating health and happiness of the animal which isnât something you would do to something you love so why is it okay to do to horses? And keeping them in stalls for convenience while blatantly ignoring the numerous studies and experiments done about the affects of stalling horses, it just doesnât make sense, this whole industry needs to change asap and Iâm sick and tired of watching people run these animals into the ground for the sake of âsportâ
theartofmadeline
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