Abstract: Conservation agencies within the European Union promote the restoration of traditional land uses as a cost-effective way to preserve biodiversity outside reserves. Although the European Union pursues the integration of the environment into strategic decision-making, it also dictates sectoral policies that may damage farmland biodiversity. We illustrate this point by outlining the socioeconomic factors that allow the persistence of traditional free-ranging horse husbandry in Galicia, northwestern Spain. Free-ranging Galician mountain ponies provide ecological and socioeconomic services including the prevention of forest fires, the maintenance of heathlands and wolves, and the attenuation of wolf-human conflicts. This traditional livestock system may have persisted because it entails negligible costs for farmers. Wolf predation upon Galician mountain ponies does not threaten farmer's economies and seems to be tolerated better than attacks to more valuable stock. Recently, European Union's regulations on animal welfare, carcass management, or meat production put new economic and administrative burdens on farmers, make free-ranging horse rearing economically unsustainable, and incentivize its abandonment. The aim of the European Union to integrate environmental policies may be successful to preserve farmland biodiversity only through careful anticipation of the side effects of apparently unrelated regulations on the fragile equilibrium that sustain traditional land uses.

Abstract: Horses’ ability to adapt to new environments and to acquire new information plays an important role in handling and training. Social learning in particular would be very adaptive for horses as it enables them to flexibly adjust to new environments. In the context of horse handling, social learning from humans has been rarely investigated but could help to facilitate management practices. We assessed the impact of human demonstration on the spatial problem-solving abilities of horses during a detour task. In this task, a bucket with a food reward was placed behind a double-detour barrier and 16 horses were allocated to two test groups of 8 horses each. One group received a human demonstration of how to solve the spatial task while the other group received no demonstration. We found that horses did not solve the detour task more often or faster with human demonstration. However, both test groups improved rapidly over trials. Our results suggest that horses prefer to use individual rather than social information when solving a spatial problem-solving task

Abstract: Summary Many publications documenting large-scale trends in the distribution of species make use of opportunistic citizen data, that is, observations of species collected without standardized field protocol and without explicit sampling design. It is a challenge to achieve reliable estimates of distribution trends from them, because opportunistic citizen science data may suffer from changes in field efforts over time (observation bias), from incomplete and selective recording by observers (reporting bias) and from geographical bias. These, in addition to detection bias, may lead to spurious trends. We investigated whether occupancy models can correct for the observation, reporting and detection biases in opportunistic data. Occupancy models use detection/nondetection data and yield estimates of the percentage of occupied sites (occupancy) per year. These models take the imperfect detection of species into account. By correcting for detection bias, they may simultaneously correct for observation and reporting bias as well. We compared trends in occupancy (or distribution) of butterfly and dragonfly species derived from opportunistic data with those derived from standardized monitoring data. All data came from the same grid squares and years, in order to avoid any geographical bias in this comparison. Distribution trends in opportunistic and monitoring data were well-matched. Strong trends observed in monitoring data were rarely missed in opportunistic data. Synthesis and applications. Opportunistic data can be used for monitoring purposes if occupancy models are used for analysis. Occupancy models are able to control for the common biases encountered with opportunistic data, enabling species trends to be monitored for species groups and regions where it is not feasible to collect standardized data on a large scale. Opportunistic data may thus become an important source of information to track distribution trends in many groups of species.

Abstract: Anecdotal reports of horses opening fastened doors and gates are an intriguing way of exploring the possible scope of horses' problem-solving capacities. The species' natural environment has no analogues of the mechanisms involved. Scientific studies on the topic are missing, because the rate of occurrence is too low for exploration under controlled conditions. Therefore, we compiled from lay persons case reports of horses opening closed doors and gates. Additionally, we collected video documentations at the internet platform YouTube, taking care to select raw data footage of unedited, clearly described and clearly visible cases of animals with no distinct signs of training or reduced welfare. The data included individuals opening 513 doors or gates on hinges, 49 sliding doors, and 33 barred doors and gateways; mechanisms included 260 cases of horizontal and 155 vertical bars, 43 twist locks, 42 door handles, 34 electric fence handles, 40 carabiners, and 2 locks with keys. Opening was usually for escape, but also for access to food or stable-mates, or out of curiosity or playfulness. While 56 percent of the horses opened a single mechanism at one location, 44 percent opened several types of mechanism (median = 2, min. = 1, max. = 5) at different locations (median = 2, min. = 1, max. = 4). The more complex the mechanism was, the more movements were applied, varying from median 2 for door handles to 10 for carabiners. Mechanisms requiring head- or lip-twisting needed more movements, with significant variation between individuals. 74 horses reported in the questionnaire had options for observing the behaviour in stable mates, 183 did not, which indicates that the latter learned to open doors and gates either individually or from observing humans. Experience favours opening efficiency; subjects which opened several door types applied fewer movements per lock than horses which opened only one door type. We failed to identify a level of complexity of door-fastening mechanism that was beyond the learning capacity of the horse to open. Thus, all devices in frequent use, even carabiners and electric fence handles, are potentially vulnerable to opening by horses, something which needs to be considered in relation to keeping horses safely.

Abstract: Every animal species has particular environmental requirements that are essential for its welfare, and when these so-called “basic needs” are not fulfilled, the animals suffer. The basic needs of horses have been claimed to be social contact, social companionship, free movement and access to roughage. To assess whether horses suffer when one or more of the four proposed basic needs are restricted, we examined several studies (n = 38) that reported behavioural and physiological reactions to these restrictions. We assigned the studies according to the four types of responses investigated: (a) Stress, (b) Active, (c) Passive, and (d) Abnormal Behaviour. Furthermore, the number of studies indicating that horses reacted to the restrictions were compared with the number of studies reporting no reaction. The limited number of studies available on single management restrictions did not allow conclusions to be drawn on the effect of each restriction separately, especially in the case of social companionship. However, when combinations of social contact, free movement and access to roughage were restricted, many of the horses had developed responses consistent with suffering. Passive Responses, indicating acute suffering, and Abnormal Behaviour, indicating suffering currently or at some time in the past, were especially clearly demonstrated. This provides further evidence of the usefulness of assessing behavioural parameters in combination with physiological measurements when evaluating horse welfare. This meta-analysis of the literature confirms that it is justified to claim that social contact, free movement and access to roughage are basic needs in horses.