Samantha Couper - Equine ABCs

10/23/2025

This is what my talk at Understand Horses Live was on this year. How horses are kept makes a huge impact on what they do with their day. And if they’re not meeting their time budget needs in a stall or while solitary, they will find things to do with that time that are not healthy (cribbing, stall walking, wood chewing, pinning their ears at passerbys, et cetera)

💡A systematic review and meta-analysis by the Universities of Bologna and Turin delivers fresh insights into how horses and ponies allocate their time each day and what this means for their welfare and management.

By integrating data from fourteen different studies between 1979 and 2020, and analysing the time budgets of 364 horses under wild, natural-living, and stabled conditions, the research team set out to understand the influence of management, social settings, diet, age, and s*x on core behaviours—feeding, resting, standing, and moving.

They found that free-ranging horses spent significantly more time feeding (about 56% of the day) than stabled horses (38%), and that horses kept in groups or grazing also dedicated more time to eating than those fed hay indoors or kept alone.

Female horses and ponies were observed to feed and rest for longer periods than males or larger horses.

In contrast, horses in confined or isolated settings stood still much more and moved less, patterns that in the wild would be unusual and may signal compromised welfare.

The study confirms that management systems allowing horses to exhibit natural foraging, social bonding, and voluntary movement are strongly linked to better welfare outcomes.

Based on these findings, the authors advocate for husbandry that replicates natural conditions as closely as possible such as providing constant access to roughage, group turnout, space for exercise, and varied environments for physical and behavioural health.

The review also highlights the importance of detailed monitoring and encourages further research using emerging technologies to support ethical and sustainable equine care.

📖 Time-activity budget in horses and ponies: A systematic review and meta-analysis on feeding dynamics and management implications,
Journal of Equine Veterinary Science, M. Lamanna, G. Buonaiuto, R. Colleluori, F. Raspa, E. Valle, D. Cavallini.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jevs.2025.105684.

10/22/2025

It’s okay to refer out to another professional, too! We’ve all got strengths and weaknesses. I love it when professionals see things as a big collaborative approach.

🤔 Not one professional is the same 🤔

Here's what I mean by this. Lets take my lovely bunch of vet physio girls. We met 12 years ago. Some of us had background in working with top class competition horses, some just owned horses and some very little horse experience at all.

We then all went through the same lectures, but some of us took more information in in the classroom, others took more information in in the practicals.

We then went off and did placements with different physios and learnt different skills.

So even on the day we all passed our exams and got the same title of Veterinary physiotherapist presented to us- our experiences through life would mean we would all treat a horse differently and see things from slightly different perspectives from day one. We were not carbon copies of each other.

10 years on, this divergence has continued. We have followed our own paths, gathered experience through our work and learnt off different people. We continue to learn off each other.

Does that make me better than my fellow professionals? No.

Does that mean that sometimes I can't quite figure something out but somebody else can straight away? Often.

I know how I treat now is VERY different to what I was taught 10 years ago, but thats it, we all bring a unique gift to the table.

So when somebody says to me 'the last therapist didn't tell me that or pick up on that'. That is ok! We all see life through a different lens.

That therapist is no less than me, there's probably things they picked up on that I haven't. I've read reports off other physios before and thought 'bloody hell I don't know anything! ' but I can guarantee they'd read my report and think the same!

So I'm not saying you must frantically use every professional in the area, but it's ok to get a second opinion.

As professionals we should be able to allow that to happen, for the good of the horse and not try bring that other professional down. (I know it's awful for the old imposter syndrome when people go elsewhere!).

We don't have all the answers and by working together, listening and learning, we can collectively improve the lives of horses. Instead of creating a world of ego and divide.

This doesn't just apply to therapists. This applies to vets, hoof care professionals, saddle fitters, behaviourists, trainers, dentists (everyone!).

I also feel it crosses in to different professions. This is holistic. I cannot treat a horse without understanding feet, saddle fit, dentistry, behaviour, nutrition etc. Just because that isn't my area of expertise doesn't mean I don't have valuable knowledge in those areas, so why are we shot down for suggesting there may be an issue in one of these areas? Who is that helping?

The owners who we work for also bring ideas and knowledge to the table through their experiences which is also invaluable. I often feel owners are quickly silenced when faced by professionals. They are often the experts on their own horses. I love nothing more than listening and learning off my clients.

So lets stop trying to bring each other down with ego or getting on the defensive when somebody suggests a different view point. Instead lets open our minds, bring forward our own unique gift and work together to help horses. After all, thats why we entered this profession in the first place, is it not?

10/20/2025

Why We Still Don’t Understand Behaviour

Every now and then I make the mistake of scrolling social media. This time it led me to the comments under a viral ‘parenting’ clip. It’s like wandering into a room full of shouty people offering advice no one asked for. This time, it was Supernanny that old show where a ‘behaviour expert’ turns up to sort out a struggling family. I should not have gone to the comments but I did.

I didn’t watch the clip. Straight to the comments. But I know the format. She marches into someone’s home and restores order. She isn’t calm, not really. She’s composed in the way people are when they’re holding on tight to everything. The voice is firm, the body language clear. It’s a performance of control dressed up as composure, and unbelievably, the internet still seems to want it. Then I made the mistake of looking at the comments:

That child needed a shock collar.

A good old-fashioned spanking required.

Give them a bite on soap.

This is a juvenile delinquent.

Time for a smackdown I’d say.

Literally hundreds of comments saying the same thing. Stop the behaviour. Tell the child who’s boss. MAKE them behave.

I read no comment that wondered how the child felt. No one asked what might be happening beneath the behaviour. The conversation wasn’t about understanding, it was about controlling.

This is exactly how many talk about horses.

When a horse bites, bolts, bucks, or plants its feet, many reach for the same vocabulary. He’s being naughty. He’s testing you. He doesn’t respect you. You need to show him who’s boss. The conviction is the same: the animal is wrong, and control is the cure.

In the 2000s, the shelves exploded with parenting books and every kind of program promising to show the ‘right’ way. I remember one book telling me to ignore my child crying at bedtime. I tried it. Maybe thirty seconds. Then I caved. My child was, and always will be, an individual, not a problem to be fixed. This was just after I bumped into clicker training dogs and my uncomfortable journey into understanding behaviour.

Behaviour isn’t the problem. It is the message.

A tantrum, a spook, a refusal, a meltdown are forms of communication. They come from discomfort, fear, frustration, confusion. Yet we’ve built a culture that reads those behaviours as disobedience. We label them as defiance because we’ve been trained to value obedience more than understanding.

A quiet child is a good child. A compliant horse is a good horse. We praise stillness even when that stillness is just shutdown. It’s what happens when a being realises that communication is useless.

What unsettled me most about the comments? Hundreds of people, all focused on stopping the child, shutting them down, showing them who’s boss. Almost no one wondered why they were behaving that way. The discussion wasn’t about understanding, it was about control. That same discussion is prevalent in comments on horse ‘trainers’ treating horse behaviour the same way.

When I work with horses that have been labelled ‘difficult’, I often hear the same story. The horse has resisted, the human pushed harder. The human feels challenged, the horse feels trapped. Both sides are shouting, but in different languages. On the inside, there is confusion and fear for both human and horse.

Understanding behaviour takes humility. I know this from personal experience and the process breaks you down, ready for a rebuild. It means giving up the illusion of control and learning to listen. It means being willing to notice that what looks like bad behaviour, might actually be a perfectly reasonable response to an unbearable pressure.

This work isn’t easy. It’s slow, quiet, and there is no drama. There’s no viral moment of triumph to share. It’s hard, patient work that builds trust. And trust comes from safety. Safety comes from feeling heard.

This often needs me to advocate for a horse that has been mislabelled as ‘difficult’. I don’t need to ask anything. It is about starting new conversations. Creating space for a new relationship to grow where there are no ‘winners’ but nor are there ‘losers’.

My question, I think, is why so many still don’t understand behaviour?

10/16/2025

This is the non-profit I serve on the board of, and teach the University of Utah class through. We’re selling prints of some of the photos we’ve taken over the years. If you’re outside of the USA and are interested in specific ones, let me know. There may be ways to use a printer local to you in order to keep shipping low!

10/08/2025

A new scientific report by Aleksandra Gorecka-Bruzda and Christine Aurich published in the journal of Applied Animal Behaviour Science explores how domestic management practices affect the welfare and reproductive health of stallions, with a special focus on the importance of social environments.

Building on a comprehensive review of scientific studies, the authors highlight that wild and free roaming stallions are intrinsically social, thriving within complex groups such as harems or bachelor bands, where they form stable bonds and interact regularly with other horses.

On the contrary most domestic stallions are typically housed alone and deprived of these crucial social dynamics, representing a dramatic and unnatural break from their evolved behavioural needs.

Their findings show that this isolation leads to frustration, abnormal behaviours such as stereotypies and self-mutilation, and can even reduce reproductive success.

The researchers use the frameworks of the Five Freedoms and the Five Domains Model to highlight the ethical issues in current breeding and husbandry routines, pointing out that welfare is not just about preventing physical suffering, but must also ensure social, cognitive, and emotional well-being.

The report provides evidence that allowing stallions more social interaction through group turnout, contact with other horses or mares, and “social boxes” results in calmer, healthier, and more fertile animals.

📖 Importance of the social environment for reproductive and general welfare of domestic horse (Equus caballus) stallions. Aleksandra Gorecka-Bruzda & Christine Aurich.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0168159125003259

10/02/2025

Horses are depended on as work animals by humans and are used in leisure and sport across the world, but the extent to which humans can recognize pain in horse faces is not known, which could impac...

09/17/2025

DO HORSES NOTICE HOW WE TREAT EACH OTHER?

What if horses are paying attention not just to what we ask of them, but to how we treat each other? A recent study suggests they do — and that what they observe could change how they behave.

Researchers from Germany and Scotland tested whether horses, after watching people interacting, would change their feeding choices.

Study details:

• The experiment involved 17 horses, ranging from 4 to 28 years old, across 5 private yards

• Horses observed a human demonstration: a person taking carrot pieces from one bucket while another human gave clear approval (body language + voice), and doing the same from another bucket but receiving disapproval

• After watching this six times, horses were allowed to choose between the buckets — though previously they had no preference and had eaten from both.

What the researchers found:

• 12 out of 17 horses changed their preference after observing the human-to-human approval interaction. They were more likely to pick from the bucket associated with approval

• Horses kept in social housing (open stabling or paddocks with others) showed this adaptation more strongly than those in more isolated housing.

Why it matters:

• Horses aren’t just responding to their direct training—they notice how we interact with others and use those cues, even if the humans involved aren’t interacting with them. What humans do matters.

Take-home messages:

• Pay attention to how people behave around your horse—not just how they behave with the horse. The horse is learning from what people do

• Horses kept socially do better at these sorts of observational tasks. Isolation doesn’t just affect their mood — it seems to limit what they can learn

• When training or managing horses, think about the environment: who’s around, what behaviour the horse is witnessing, and how interactions outside of training may still contribute to the horse’s learning experiences.

Do you think your horse picks up on how you interact with others — not just with them?

Study: Krueger et al (2025). Learning from eavesdropping on human-human encounters changes feeding location choice in horses (Equus Caballus).

09/01/2025

PRACTICE SKILLS BEFORE YOU NEED THEM

Don’t wait for an emergency to get your horses prepared. Good skills come from good, clean training again and again. When we’re stressed, our skillsets deteriorate. Likewise, when a horse is stressed their responses often deteriorate too. The best way to combat that is to ensure your skills are superb outside of the emergency.

Someday, I may have to lead and load both of these horses without any help. Or, someone else may have to. With both horses, we practice alone first. We train for leading by my side and behind. You never know what type of leading you’re going to need, so ideally a horse should be comfortable leading behind you or next to you. And if you’re using food to train where to walk, you want to do those patterns again and again so that they are your horse’s default position even when they’re scared.

Practicing for the real moment also gives you a chance to see what configuration your horses do better rather than fighting with it in the moment. The black horse much prefers to be behind a ways. If I want him to lead comfortably to my left we need to practice a lot more with just he and I. But he’s incredibly soft to lead and responds to incredibly light feel so this setup will work for us in an emergency and I know it will keep the horse’s stress levels lower than another configuration. Did you see how subtle of a cue it took to move the black horse more to my left side?

Nova, on the other hand, needs some more practice leading solo and right at my shoulder. You can see she has the slight tendency to pull ahead, so we’ll want to make sure she knows the pattern of where to be like the back of her hoof. We will also want her responding as soft as butter to pressure on her nose, so she will automatically slow down to that feeling without me having to exert any additional pressure on her head.

They’re both doing great, but practicing for these moments has highlighted some areas for improvement and also shone some light on some things they are doing great on!

08/25/2025

I see more ' problem horses" that are the result of conventional " wisdom" than I ever see from abuse.

That's not to say that the conventional "wisdom" isn't sometimes abusive. It is just widely accepted in the industry that it is fair.
At the start of my career I mainly worked with troubled horses. The buckers, bolsters, spookers, and horses that wouldn't trailer load.
If people weren't sure of a horses history, they would often comment that the horse must have been abused, but when there was a known history, they were usually confused. In fact, they often didn't think their horse was displyaing these behaviors due to anxiety. They were only convinced once we worked on relaxation, and the behaviors no longer presented.

Abuse, or at least the overt form of abuse, with handlers beating horses, is actually rare. Most horse people genuinely love horses.
The trouble is our indistry wide understanding of fair practice.
The number of horses with aggressive and/or anxiety driven behaviors that are the direct results of isolation is staggering. Even with the push for education on species appropriate needs, it is still accepted practice to keep horses in isolation. I still have a social media feed full of adverts for livery with " individual turn out'.
When it gets to handling, people are taught to tightly restrain horses, whether just leading on a short lead, or to perform management tasks. Restraining a prey animal causes anxiety, and they fight to get away. We ignore their natural behavior, and cause undesirable behavior.

As for riding, I could fill a book with reasons conventional riding "wisdom" causes behavioral issues, but a simple example is that horses are started under saddle with contact, which from a physics point of view prevents forward motion, then they are driven forward from legs, spurs or crops. Very conflicting cues for a young horse, already worried about a predator climbing on their back.

Horses being lunged in draw-reins, or tied to patiance poles, or halter trained by being tied to donkeys... These are all things I come across that cause major behavioral issues, but the industry as a whole often deems perfectly normal practices.
Before you declare that your horse must have faced abuse, make sure your industry sanctioned training and management isn't to blame.

08/25/2025

The entire time spent training (including getting the food together) over all 3 sessions was 6 minutes. Mistakes included because it’s important to show we all make them.

08/24/2025

TRANS-SPECIES PSYCHOLOGY IS NOT ANTHROPOMORPHISM

Both anthropomorphism - attributing human traits to animals - and anthropodenial can be problematic for several reasons:

1. Misunderstanding Behaviour: Misinterpretation of emotional state, such as assuming a dog's wagging tail always indicates happiness, or using 'one-technique-fits-all' practices.

2. Ethical Issues: It may justify the misuse and/or mistreatment of animals in particular contexts (e.g. entertainment, research) or more generally.

3. Biased Research: resulting in, and building upon, skewed scientific observations and conclusions.

4. Conservation Impact: Unrealistic expectations can affect conservation efforts, and lead to dangerous human-wildlife interactions.

5. Cultural Misrepresentations: perpetuating stereotypes and misconceptions, resulting in falsely-confident cultural belief and institutional bias.

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08/24/2025

Rethinking your reinforcement routines will change your whole relationship with using food in training.

Reinforcement is not just food, it is a behaviour in its own right. And your reinforcement routine is more powerful than you think.

I’ve already shared how I ALWAYS introduce the reinforcement routine (how the food or scratches will be delivered) before asking for any behaviour, and how that routine effectively becomes the last link in a behaviour chain.

There are many different ways to deliver reinforcement. The routine you choose can, and should, help shape the rhythm of a session. It should put the horse back into the ready position to recreate the behaviour again with the best chance of success.

Most people only ever learn the option of delivering food from their hand to the horse’s mouth. This is a perfectly good routine and it also functions beautifully as a distraction if you need to change your own position, such as switching sides.

You could also drop food into a bucket. This is especially useful for cooperative care or behaviours that require stillness. Just remember that even if your horse eats from a bucket every day, you may still need to teach the bucket routine as if it were something new 😉. A bucket, or a mat on the floor, also gives you a clear ready signal when your horse lifts their head to say, “I’m finished and ready to go again.”

We can also walk and feed on the go for movement behaviours that we would rather not interrupt. This one should be used carefully, and only after you and your horse have learned the skill.

Another variation is the 'click and walk to food' routine. This is handy for transitions such as halt to walk, where you might ask for the walk, mark the transition, and then continue a few strides to the reinforcement point. Like everything else, this routine has to be taught and shaped.

One of my favourites is the cup on a stick lure (thanks Kay Laurence). I will often use this instead of a target to build movement. It might be a large cup measure secured to a bamboo pole, or even a pinch of haylage between barbecue tongs. As with any lure, it needs to be carefully taught, shaped, AND always faded out.

The important thing is not which routine you choose but that you keep it clear and consistent. When your horse knows exactly how reinforcement will arrive, the behaviour chain becomes predictable. That predictability reduces frustration and creates that wonderful 'oh, I know what to do' feeling, especially when you start chaining behaviours together or thinning reinforcement.

So instead of thinking of reinforcement as just food or scratches, think of it as a behaviour in its own right- behaviours that can, and should, be taught and developed.

Do you have a favourite reinforcement routine?