VETERINARY MEDICINE
Gregarious horses are less stressed during medical procedures
A loop around their lip can calm horses during minor medical procedures – but only when they have the right personality.
The ‘lip twitch’ can be used instead of tranquillising drugs. | Photo: provided by subject
Putting ice on your forehead can help with headaches, while electrostimulation to the abdomen can ease menstrual cramps. This is a phenomenon well-known in pain research: if two painful stimuli act simultaneously, then the individual stimulus is not perceived as strongly. A team at the Vetsuisse Faculty in Bern has now shown that this principle also works for some horses when a so-called ‘lip twitch’ is applied.
The twitch is a loop that is tied around the horse’s upper lip, rather like you would wrap a hair tie around a plait. In equine medicine, a twitch is usually employed during minor procedures. It distracts the horse’s attention from the medical intervention and even has a calming effect on some that enables vets to refrain from using tranquillising drugs. A research group under Claudia Spadavecchia at the University of Bern has been investigating whether horses experience stress and pain when a twitch is employed. They found that the ten horses in their study demonstrated behaviour suggesting mild to moderate stress and pain, such as tucking their ears back more, moving their heads restlessly or prancing with their front legs.
However, Spadavecchia also observed that the animals behaved differently depending on their personality. They were able to determine the personality of the individual horses by means of a questionnaire filled out by the person responsible for them. The results showed that neurotic horses that already tended to be anxious and fearful showed more stress signals than the others and were more likely to remain ‘frozen’ in a motionless state. Conversely, the more gregarious horses were less stressed and more resilient to the use of the twitch. Extrovert horses wouldn’t tolerate the twitch at all at first. Spadavecchia says that “based on our study, I can recommend the twitch for minor interventions, provided that the horse tolerates it well. In our experience, this was mainly the case with the gregarious horses”. It is therefore important to know the character of the animal before treating it.
