Activity Time Budgets-A Potential Tool to Monitor Equine Welfare?
Authors: Auer Ulrike, Kelemen Zsofia, Engl Veronika, Jenner Florien
Journal: Animals : an open access journal from MDPI
Summary
# Activity Time Budgets as a Welfare Monitoring Tool in Horses Understanding how horses allocate their time across fundamental behaviours—eating, resting, moving and lying—offers an objective window into their welfare status, since healthy, unstressed animals maintain predictable daily routines. Auer and colleagues conducted a systematic review of 12 peer-reviewed studies encompassing 144 horses (59 semi-feral and 85 domesticated) with continuous 24-hour behavioural monitoring, establishing baseline time budget ranges for key activities: foraging/eating (10–6.6%), resting (8.1–66%), lying (2.7–27.3%) and locomotion (0.015–19.1%). The substantial variation across studies—largely attributable to age differences and environmental conditions—reveals that management factors substantially influence behavioural expression; domesticated horses provided ad libitum forage access, increased space and lower stocking densities demonstrated time budgets converging towards those of semi-feral populations. For practitioners, this suggests that time budget analysis could serve as a quantifiable, evidence-based welfare indicator, allowing farriers, veterinarians and yard managers to identify deviations from normative behavioural patterns that may signal pain, stress or inadequate environmental conditions; establishing baseline reference values specific to individual horses and their management contexts would strengthen the practical application of this monitoring approach.
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Practical Takeaways
- •Monitor your horses' daily activity patterns (eating, resting, lying, moving) as a practical welfare indicator—significant deviations from normal patterns may signal stress or health issues
- •Providing ad libitum forage access and adequate space encourages natural behavioral time budgets and improves welfare, even in domesticated settings
- •Establish baseline time budgets for your individual horses and herd to detect welfare problems early, as repetitive daily routines indicate healthy, stress-free animals
Key Findings
- •24-hour time budgets for eating (10-66%), resting (8.1-66%), lying (2.7-27.3%), and locomotion (0.015-19.1%) show large variance between studies primarily driven by age and environmental conditions
- •Management interventions providing ad libitum food access, increased space, and lower population density in domesticated horses produced time budgets similar to semi-feral conspecifics
- •Temporal quantification of behavioral activities represents an objective, evidence-based assessment criterion for equine welfare monitoring