Stabled horses often perform stereotypic patterns of movement, such as weaving pacing in the stall. Environmental enrichment is seen as one way of addressing this problem. In particular, this paper examined the concept of providing animals with a greater view of their environment. Horses were housed in standard loose (box) stalls. Treatment varied according to how any sides of the stall were opened to allow the animal to see its environment. Opening of the various doors, windows and side panels also allowed the animals to better hear and interact with the outdoor environment (front and back of stall) and horses in adjacent stalls (sides). Increasing the number of sides that were open to the environment decreased the incidence of weaving in the horses. Three hypotheses are given to explain this improvement in behaviour. It could be the novelty of the expanded environment, in which case the stereotypic behaviours would develop again once the novelty wore off. No evidence was seen of this, but the trial was of a limited length. Secondly, The open treatments could allow animals greater opportunity to interact with the environment, and these behaviours would compete with the stereotypies for time budget. The third hypothesis is that the open windows allowed the expression of specific and beneficial activities that improved the welfare of the animals. These could include monitoring of the environment or social interaction. The conclusion is that opening the stalls to the surrounding environment reduced the incidence of weaving in the horses.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Stabled horses often perform stereotypic patterns of movement, such as weaving pacing in the stall. Environmental enrichment is seen as one way of addressing this problem. In particular, this paper examined the concept of providing animals with a greater view of their environment. Horses were housed in standard loose (box) stalls. Treatment varied according to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[928],"tags":[2512,19102,8882,640,19644,4171,27280,5326,72,71,47,2771,4264,22808,16262,4599,3283,20911,4874,12363,14410,14923,14909,52,27281],"class_list":["post-5018","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-welfare","tag-activitybehaviourenrichmentenvironmentenvironmental-enrichmenthorsehousingnoveltystabled-horsesstereotypic-behaviourstereotypiesstereotypytime-budgetweavingwelfare","tag-address","tag-al","tag-animal","tag-dd","tag-enrichment","tag-environment","tag-environmental-enrichment","tag-horse","tag-horses","tag-housing","tag-iron","tag-outdoor","tag-pic","tag-pl","tag-stall","tag-stalls","tag-t","tag-tan","tag-the-effect-of-increasing-visual-horizons-on-stereotypic-weaving","tag-the-effect-of-increasing-visual-horizons-on-stereotypic-weaving-implications-for-the-social-housing-of-stabled-horses","tag-the-welfare","tag-the-welfare-of","tag-treatment","tag-welfare"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/prairieswine.com\/rsc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5018","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/prairieswine.com\/rsc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/prairieswine.com\/rsc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/prairieswine.com\/rsc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/prairieswine.com\/rsc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5018"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/prairieswine.com\/rsc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5018\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/prairieswine.com\/rsc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5018"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/prairieswine.com\/rsc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5018"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/prairieswine.com\/rsc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5018"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}