(Press-News.org) The horse was domesticated many thousands of years ago and has been hugely important in the development of human civilization. It is hard to overstate its role in agriculture, in transport and communications and even in military operations. More recently, equestrian sports have gained markedly in popularity, so even though the horse has largely been superseded in modern farming and military practice its connection to man remains as close as ever.
Nevertheless, the horse retains at least some aspects of its wild origins. It is clear that horses are frequently subjected to situations that would be extremely stressful for genuinely wild animals, such as training of racehorses, performance in equestrian competitions, examinations by vets and transport by road. Indeed, all of these are known to be associated with stress reactions in horses. Even being ridden could represent a source of stress but there have to date been very few studies on this aspect. Recent work by Alice Schmidt in the group of Christine Aurich at the University of Veterinary Medicine, Vienna has for the first time examined the stress suffered by young horses when they are trained to be ridden.
Schmidt measures stress by examining the horses' heartbeats and the levels of the stress hormone cortisol in their saliva. In looking at heartbeats she considers not only their frequency but also the short-term fluctuations in intervals between the beats, which have previously been shown to be a good indicator for stress. Training of sports horses usually starts when the animals are three years old, so for her recent work Schmidt examined horses of this age at the start of their initial training regimes.
Perhaps not surprisingly, she found that the start of training was a stressful period. The initial work on the lunge caused only a moderate amount of stress but the stress level rose markedly when the rider first mounted. This was revealed by an immediate increase in heartbeat and in the fluctuations in intervals between individual beats, as well as by the release of cortisol into the saliva. It seems likely that the horse interprets the first mounting of a rider as a potentially lethal attack by a predator, from which it is unable to escape. In addition, the rider is outside the horse's field of vision, which presumably exacerbates the problem.
Perhaps surprisingly, when the horse and rider walk or trot forwards, the level of stress decreases somewhat. It thus seems as though the horse adapts rapidly to the idea of being ridden and that – as is the case for humans – exercise may help relieve stress. Furthermore, the extent of stress caused by mounting was found to decrease gradually as the horse is trained, providing that this is done correctly. Aurich cautions that a lack of care or an incorrect regime in early training could cause long-term damage to the relationship between a horse and its rider and thus prevent a sports horse from reaching its full potential as well as causing the animal unnecessary anxiety.
Although her results make clear for the first time that the initial training of a sports horse does stress it, Schmidt has some reassuring words for trainers and jockeys. "The stress caused by being ridden for the first time is nowhere near as much as that caused by being transported by road. And if you are gentle and careful when you start to train a young horse, it will soon get used to you."
INFORMATION:
The paper Changes in cortisol release and heart rate and heart rate variability during the initial training of three-year-old sport horses by Alice Schmidt, Jörg Aurich, Erich Möstl, Jürgen Müller and Christine Aurich is published in the september issue of the journal Hormones and Behavior. The work was carried out at the University of Veterinary Medicine, Vienna and the Graf Lehndorff Institute for Equine Science, Neustadt (Dosse), Germany.
About the University of Veterinary Medicine, Vienna
The University of Veterinary Medicine, Vienna is the only academic and research institution in Austria that focusses on the veterinary sciences. About 1000 employees and 2300 students work on the campus in the north of Vienna, which also houses the animal hospital and various spin-off-companies.
http://www.vetmeduni.ac.at
END
As the United States prepares for the upcoming flu season, a group of researchers supported by the National Institutes of Health continues to model how H1N1 may spread.
The work is part of an effort, called the Models of Infectious Disease Agent Study (MIDAS), to develop computational models for conducting virtual experiments of how emerging pathogens could spread with and without interventions. The study involves more than 50 scientists with expertise in epidemiology, infectious diseases, computational biology, statistics, social sciences, physics, computer sciences ...
Researchers from North Carolina State University have developed new software that offers significantly enhanced security for cloud-computing systems. The software is much better at detecting viruses or other malware in the "hypervisors" that are critical to cloud computing, and does so without alerting the malware that it is being examined.
Cloud computing is being hailed as a flexible, affordable way of offering computer resources to consumers. Under the cloud-computing paradigm, the computational power and storage of multiple computers is pooled, and can be shared by ...
Researchers have found that magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) may be sufficient for the routine surveillance of some great vessel (primary blood vessels [e.g., aorta and vena cavae]) stents that are commonly used to treat congenital heart defects (a defect in the structure of the heart and great vessels that is present at birth) in children and young adults, according to a study in the October issue of the American Journal of Roentgenology (www.ajronline.org). MRI is a noninvasive medical test that helps physicians diagnose and treat medical conditions.
"Computed tomography ...
Scientists at the University of Granada have developed a new therapy for the treatment of skin and lung cancer. This therapy involves the use of a suicide coliphage-gene (gene E) that can induce death to cells transfected with it.. Their studies have demostrated that this technique is not only effective in vitro (using tumour cell cultures), but also in vivo through the use of experimental animals in which tumours were induced.
Although further research is required, the results obtained at the University of Granada revealed gene E's intensive antitumour activity, which ...
The prediction of the structure and function of biological macromolecules (i.e., the machinery of life) is of foremost importance in the field of structural biology. Since the elucidation of the three-dimensional structure of DNA (the molecule that carries all genetic information) by Watson and Crick, scientists have strived to decipher the hidden code that determines the evolution of the spatial arrangement of these molecules towards their functional native state. Attempts to follow these structural transitions experimentally and with atomic resolution are hampered by ...
"Yeah, I'm on my way home." "That's funny." "Uh-huh." "What? No! I thought you were – " "Oh, ok." Listening to someone talk on a cell phone is very annoying. A new study published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, finds out why: Hearing just one side of a conversation is much more distracting than hearing both sides and reduces our attention in other tasks.
Lauren Emberson, a psychology Ph.D. candidate at Cornell University, came up with the idea for the study when she was taking the bus as an undergraduate student at the ...
Philadelphia, PA, September 21, 2010 – For the past two decades, cancer therapy has become more sophisticated and effective, resulting in an ever-expanding group of long-term cancer survivors. There is also a growing awareness of the potentially negative effects of cancer treatment on the heart and the management of cardiac disease during and after cancer therapy. In the September/October issue of Progress in Cardiovascular Diseases an international group of experts takes an in-depth look at the ways in which cancer treatment profoundly impacts patients' cardiovascular ...
West Lafayette, IN—September 21, 2010— While most citizens recognize that corruption is "bad," the average citizen is unaware of the benefits enjoyed by politically connected firms, or how common government favors are worldwide. In the U.S., many citizens were outraged at the provision and size of bailouts for "too big to fail" banks. A new study from the journal Financial Management claims that not only does corruption exist in the corporate world, but that political connections are extremely important for corporate success.
Author Mara Faccio studied several thousand ...
The ability to understand emotions is a key ingredient in people who become leaders in groups with no formal authority, a new paper has found.
The findings come through two different studies using commerce students. Study participants were given an emotional ability test as part of the study, as well as a self-analysis of their emotional skills. Then, they organized themselves into small groups or were randomly assigned to small groups and were given a group project to do.
At the end of the project they were asked to identify whom they thought had shown the greatest ...
Research on the quality of US resident physician performance levels has often been limited by lack of a comparison group or strict focus on specific diseases and geographical areas. In order to gain insight on differences in quality of care provided by resident physicians versus staff physicians, Boston Medical Center (BMC) and Palo Alto Medical Foundation researchers investigated performance of physicians in 33,900 hospital-based outpatient visits throughout the US.
The researchers collected data from the 1997-2004 National Hospital Ambulatory Medical Care Survey and ...
