Can horses develop trauma?
All animals, including horses, eventually experience pain, loss, illness, injury, and fear. These unpleasant events are universal to all living creatures capable of feeling emotions and physical sensations.
When a horse experiences extreme fear or suffering, they may develop trauma: lasting behavioural, psychological, and physiological changes that affect the horse long after the event itself is over. Not all horses will develop trauma if exposed to the same event. Factors such as genetics and life experiences, ‘nature and nurture’, impact whether trauma develops in an individual.
Research has shown that numerous animal species can develop trauma after exposure to events that overwhelm their ability to cope. Animals, including horses, can even develop PTSD-like conditions after traumatic events.
How Trauma Impacts Horses
Trauma can be thought of as a 'behavioural injury'. This is because traumatic events cause very real changes to how the horse's brain - the primary driver of behaviour - functions. When horses experience a physical injury, it changes how they move, what they feel, and how they behave in daily life. The same thing happens with trauma. It changes normal daily functioning, negatively affecting the horse's mental, physical, social, and emotional well-being.
In horses, the effects of trauma include:
• Increased hypervigilance and anxiety, due to overactivation of the amygdala
• Changes to memory formation and integration, due to atrophy of the hippocampus
• Reduced ability to regulate emotions and responses to stimuli, due to changes to frontal regions of the cortex
• Changes to the feedback loops between regions of the brain, particularly those affecting emotional processing
• Sympathetic nervous system activation, resulting in increased adrenaline production, elevated blood glucose levels, increased blood flow to/tension of muscles
• Hypothalamic pituitary adrenal axis activation elevates cortisol levels, negatively affecting cognitive functioning, attention, learning ability, and overall health
• Increased allostatic load, affecting metabolism, increasing inflammation, and decreasing immune responses
Signs of Trauma in Horses
While we can't easily measure physiological changes such as adrenaline or cortisol levels we can see signs of trauma in horses, through changes in their behaviour. For example, traumatized horses may show:
• Increased anxiety and hypervigilance
• Increased startle responses or restlessness
• Anhedonia, a reduced ability to engage in activities that once brought pleasure
• Passivity
• New or increased aggression
• Changes to sleep, appetite, and social relationships
• Increased attempts to escape or avoid specific things or events
• A sense of powerlessness and depression-like states
Help for Traumatized Horses
Just like people, traumatized horses need the right care and support to recover from trauma. While we can't help traumatized horses through approaches designed for people, such as talk-based therapy, we can implement other evidence-based protocols that help with trauma recovery. These include practices that increase feelings of safety, help the traumatized individual gain back a sense of control and agency, and rebuild trust between the horse and people in the horse’s life. Additionally, retraining techniques that create positive feelings for the horse and encourage healthy neuroplasticity may be used if horses need to relearn how to feel safe with specific triggers.
While there are no quick-fixes, traumatized horses can recover with the right support. Just like with people, horses who have experienced trauma may need weeks, months, or sometimes even years to recover.
If you think your horse has experienced trauma, please get in touch.