Polish researchers are busy exploring the degree of motivation with horses to jump. As far as the research stands now, sport horses proved to be more willing jumpers than leisure horses, the researchers found, but that willingness appeared to wane with only modest increases in jump heights. Aleksandra Górecka-Bruzdaemail, from the Polish Academy of Sciences, noted that showjumping was one of the most popular equestrian disciplines. However, strategic jumping was seldom used by free-living horses when negotiating obstacles that they might otherwise avoid.
The Polish researchers set about trying to establish if horses were naturally motivated to jump in a free-choice situation when negotiating various obstacles under test conditions. Their findings have been published in the July issue of '
Journal of Veterinary Behavior: Clinical Applications and Research'. First, horses were presented with two optional routes to reach food. One was a shorter route over an obstacle while the alternative was a longer route around the obstacle. During eight consecutive trials, the horses encountered an increase in obstacle height on every second trial, ranging up to a modest maximum of 50 centimetres. In a ridden test, after an initial conditioning period, the horses were then tested during three consecutive trials, where one element of the Y-mazed construction contained an obstacle arm. The horses showed a strong preference to walk or trot over the obstacle (59.9 percent), jumping it in only 10.7 percent of cases.
For both the leisure horse and sport horse groups, the motivation to traverse the obstacle decreased as the obstacle height increased, with only 44.1 per cent of horses actually negotiating the 50-centimetre obstacle compared with the 20-centimetre obstacle (85.3 percent). The group of leisure horses preferred to go around the obstacle significantly more often than the sport horse group. The leisure horses used a jumping strategy to clear the obstacle far less frequently (4.2 per cent across six trials) than the sport horses (18 percent across 23 trials).
“There was no evidence of any correlation between the motivation to clear the obstacle and total number of obstacle arm choices in either the leisure horse group or the sport horse group,” the authors wrote.
©equnews.com/ Journal of Veterinary Behaviour
Polish researchers are busy exploring the degree of motivation with horses to jump. As far as the research stands now, sport horses proved to be more willing jumpers than leisure horses, the researchers found, but that willingness appeared to wane with only modest increases in jump heights. Aleksandra Górecka-Bruzdaemail, from the Polish Academy of Sciences, noted that showjumping was one of the most popular equestrian disciplines. However, strategic jumping was seldom used by free-living horses when negotiating obstacles that they might otherwise avoid.