Abstract: Abstract The predominant housing system used for domestic horses is individual stabling; however, housing that limits social interaction and requires the horse to live in semi-isolation has been reported to be a concern for equine welfare. The aim of the current study was to compare behavioural and physiological responses of domestic horses in different types of housing design that provided varying levels of social contact. Horses (n = 16) were divided equally into four groups and exposed to each of four housing treatments for a period of five days per treatment in a randomized block design. The four housing treatments used were single housed no physical contact (SHNC), single housed semi-contact (SHSC), paired housed full contact (PHFC) and group housed full contact (GHFC). During each housing treatment, adrenal activity was recorded using non-invasive faecal corticosterone metabolite analysis (fGC). Thermal images of the eye were captured and eye temperature was assessed as a non-invasive measure of the stress response. Behavioural analysis of time budget was carried out and an ease of handling score was assigned to each horse in each treatment using video footage. SHNC horses had significantly higher (p = 0.01) concentrations of fGC and were significantly (p = 0.003) more difficult to handle compared to the other housing types. GHFC horses, although not significantly different, had numerically lower concentrations of fGC and were more compliant to handling when compared to all other housing treatments. Eye temperature was significantly (p = 0.0001) lower in the group housed treatment when compared to all other treatments. These results indicate that based on physiological and behavioural measures incorporating social contact into the housing design of domestic horses could improve the standard of domestic equine welfare.

Abstract: Monitoring large carnivores is a central issue in conservation biology. The wolf (Canis lupus) is the most studied large carnivore in the world. After a massive decline and several local extinctions, mostly due to direct persecutions, wolves are now recolonizing many areas of their historical natural range. One of the main monitoring techniques is the howling survey, which is based on the wolves' tendency to use vocalisations to mark territory ownership in response to howls of unknown individuals. In most cases wolf howling sessions are useful for the localisation of the pack, but they provide only an aural estimation of the chorus size.

Abstract: Social learning is fundamental to social life across the animal kingdom, but we still know little about how natural selection has shaped social learning abilities on a proximate level. Sometimes, complex social learning phenomena can be entirely explained by Pavlovian processes that have little to do with the evolution of sociality. This implies that the ability to learn socially could be an exaptation, not an adaptation, to social life but not that social learning abilities have been left untouched by natural selection. I discuss new empirical evidence for associative learning in social information use, explain how natural selection might facilitate the associative learning process and discuss why such studies are changing the way that we think about social learning.

Abstract: The evaluation of important parameters for measuring the horses’ cognitive capacities is one of the central topics of the equine behaviour team at Nürtingen-Geislingen University. Social complexity has been said to be one of the settings in which needs for cognitive capacities arise in animals. A variety of studies throughout the last two decades proved the horses’ social complexity to be far more elaborate than previously assumed. Horses form social bonds for the protection of offspring, intervene in encounters of others, identify group mates individually and easily orientate in a fission fusion society.
In such socially complex societies, animals will benefit from learning socially. In many bird and primate species the degree of social complexity correlates nicely with the species abilities for social learning. Social learning was, therefore, argued to be an indicator for elaborate mental capacities in animals. We were delighted to prove that horses actually copy social behaviour and techniques for operating a feeding apparatus from older and higher ranking group members. In a recent study we found young horses, at the age of 3 to 12, to copy the operation of a feeding apparatus from a human demonstrator. Social learning seems to work nicely in horses when the social background of the animals is considered.
The degree to which individual animals adapt to changes in their social or physical environment by finding innovative solution appears to be the other side of the coin, of whether animals adjust to challenges by social learning. It is not very astonishing, that along with the animals’ social complexity and their ability to learn socially also the degree to which they show innovative behaviour was claimed to be one of the most important demonstrations of advanced cognitive capacities. In a recent approach, we started to ask horse owners and horse keepers in many countries to tell us about unusual behaviour of their horses via a web site (http://innovative-behaviour.org). To date, we received 204 cases of innovative behaviour descriptions from which six cases were clear examples of tool use or borderline tool use. We categorized the innovative behaviours into the classes, a) innovations to gain food, b) innovations to gain freedom, c) social innovations, d) innovations to increase maintenance, and e) innovations that could not be clearly assigned to a category. About 20% of the innovative horses showed more than one innovation. These animals could be termed “true innovators”. Again, young horses were more innovative than older ones with the age group 5 – 9 showing the highest number of innovative behaviour descriptions.
In a nutshell, the horses’ cognitive capacities appear to be underestimated throughout the last decades. The horses’ social complexity is far more elaborate than previously assumed, horses learn socially from conspecific and humans, some of them demonstrate innovative behaviour adaptations to their environment and even simple forms of tool use.