Behavior

Socializing Horses Makes Them Neigh-borly

By Adam Marcus

Giving horses a scheduled time to socialize with their fellow equids is beneficial for the animals, and it carries a surprising upside: the horses appear to get along better with their human handlers, too.

Research conducted by animal behavior experts in France showed that horses paired with a playmate for 1 hour a day seemed more tolerant and relaxed during grooming.

“Our study demonstrated that even just 1 hour of social contact per day can have significant positive effects on the welfare of stalled horses,” said Anna Flamand, a PhD student at of the Social and Cognitive Ethology Group at the University of Clermont-Auvergne, in France.

In previous research, Dr. Flamand’s group reported that young horses allowed to socialize in pairs with other young horses for 2 hours per day appeared calmer while being broken in than animals kept isolated from conspecifics.

“These young horses had previously lived in groups with conspecifics of the same age,” Dr. Flamand said. “During breaking-in, we examined their transition from a group housing system outdoors to individual stalls. The key issue in this case was determining whether maintenance of temporary but regular social contact could mitigate the negative effects of individual housing during this transition, particularly in young horses.”

For the new study, which was published recently in the journal Animal Behaviour, Dr. Flamand and her colleagues repeated the experiment in 20 adult sport horses that had been living individually for many years, “and had therefore been deprived of social interaction for a long period,” she explained.

“What is particularly innovative in this study is that, in addition to assessing behaviors in the individual stalls and during human interactions, we incorporated a cognitive test: the judgment bias test [JBT]. This test, derived from human psychology, has been adapted and validated in numerous studies on non-human animals during the past 20 years,” Dr. Flamand said.

For 4 months, half of the study horses were allowed to interact for 1 hour per day with another horse. The meetings took place in a boxed-in area. Meanwhile, the other half were kept isolated in their stalls.

Observers assessed the horses’ behavior in their individual stalls and during grooming, and they looked for hypervigilance, apathy and aggression toward humans and other horses.

“Horses in the social condition exhibited fewer stereotyped behaviors in the individual stall than the isolated ones,” according to the researchers. “During grooming, they expressed fewer negative behaviors, spent less time in a vigilant state and showed a less tense attitude.”

In addition, the researchers said horses allowed to socialize also seemed to be more “optimistic” than the isolated animals, indicating “that horses that are allowed to interact socially perceive their environment more positively than their isolated counterparts.”

In other words, “the JBT revealed that horses with access to social contact perceived their living environment more positively than those without a social partner,” Dr. Flamand told Modern Equine Vet.

One of the particularly interesting findings of the new study, Dr. Flamand added, was that isolated horses deprived of a social life “were more vigilant and agitated when interacting with humans.”

She said these behaviors could increase the likelihood of risky situations—such as horses on high alert that do not pay attention to the handler or become aggressive—or undermine the horse-human relationship by making the animals less cooperative or nervous.

“What is striking is that, in this case, we were not dealing with young horses unfamiliar with handling and new to the facility, as in the previous study, but with horses that were accustomed to their environment, had lived there for several years, and were worked daily,” she explained. “Yet despite this, we observed that horses deprived of social contact exhibited more vigilance postures and were more frequently agitated than those that had the opportunity to interact socially.”

For equine professionals, the message of the research is clear: don’t dismiss the importance of social contact in horses.

“Regardless of their use, horses are social animals that have a fundamental need to form strong bonds with 1 or more conspecifics,” Dr. Flamand said. “If housing a horse with others is not possible, alternative solutions should be explored, such as open partition, or group turnout times to allow for direct physical contact—visual or distant contact is not sufficient—and to better meet their social needs.” MeV

For more information:
Flamand A, Robinet L, Raskin A, et al. The social dimension of equine welfare: social contact positively affects the emotional state of stalled horses. Animl Behav. 2025;221;123055.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S000334722400366X

Flamand A, Zellenka C, Mos J, et al. Neigh-bours: Why every young horse needs good friends. A pilot study during the breaking-in period Appl Anim Behav Sci. 2024;272:106190. 
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0168159124000388