Horse news, research and information
Does your horse make faces because of pain? Yes, according to researchers from Italy, Germany, and the United Kingdom, they developed what they call a horse grimace scale.
Six researchers monitored the neutered stallions and developed a standardized scale of facial expressions to help horse managers identify pain.
Dr. Michela Minero and her colleagues believe that the scale can help the welfare of horses that have undergone conventional surgery.
The researchers’ findings have been published in the open-access journal PLoS ONE, and they stated that recognizing and reducing pain is essential to the well-being of horses.
"Although considerable progress has been made in understanding the physiology and treatment of pain in animals over the past 20 years, the pain assessment of horses undergoing management procedures (such as branding, pinning, and castration) is still difficult, and often times less. Excellent," they said. .
"Although castration of horses is a common procedure, so far there is no gold standard for pain assessment.
"As with other animal species, horse pain is difficult to assess because they cannot communicate with humans in a meaningful way."
46 stallions of different breeds of 1-5 years old were used in the study. They were divided into one of two treatment groups and a control group.
The treated horses were castrated by conventional surgery.
Group A consisted of 19 horses who received an injection of flunixin-meglumine (commonly known as Banamine) immediately before anesthesia, while group B consisted of 21 horses who received the same drug before anesthesia and 6 hours after the operation.
The study also used a control group of six horses that required non-invasive diagnostic procedures under general anesthesia.
All horses studied were hospitalized for five days. As a baseline, HD video of the horse was taken for 30 minutes one day before the operation and 8 hours after the operation. The video recording lasted for five days, from which high-quality images of horse faces were extracted.
A well-trained treatment observer who is experienced in evaluating facial expressions of other species compares the images of each subject before and 8 hours after the operation to determine the changes in facial expressions associated with these procedures. The observer does not know which treatment group each horse falls into.
Therefore, Minero joined the research of Emanuela Dalla Costa, Dirk Lebelt, Diana Stucke, Elisabetta Canali and Matthew Leach to evaluate the response of six "facial movement units" to pain:
Each indicator is scored on a scale of 0-2, with 0 being non-existent, 1 being moderately present, and 2 being obviously present. The highest rating for any horse on the horse grimace scale is 12.
The researchers pointed out that pain-related behaviors mainly occurred 8 hours after surgery, indicating that this is a critical period for pain assessment.
When tested on a group of five blinded observers, the researchers found that the scale was reliable and consistent between different observers in each animal.
The author points out that the facial expression changes associated with pain seem to be similar to those previously described in other species, but there are some subtle differences.
They say that it has been clearly demonstrated before that horse pain can be expressed by other general non-specific indicators, such as reduction in normal activities, bowing, staring, stiff posture and reluctance to move. In fact, in this study, horses undergoing conventional castration showed a tendency to keep their head in a lower position eight hours after surgery.
The researchers concluded: “The results of this study show that the horse grimace score is a potentially effective method for assessing the pain associated with horse castration.”
The overall accuracy of the scale is estimated to be 73.3%.
They believe that using this scale to score postoperative pain has a significant advantage over manual behavior analysis, which may be complicated because more behaviors may need to be scored.
"Behavior-based evaluation seems to be more time-consuming (behavior-based evaluation analysis time is 20 hours, while Horse Grimace Score analysis time is 40 minutes).
"In addition, the horse's facial expression changes can be detected without the need to approach the subject, and observers with different expertise can only rely on the "Horse Facial Expression Scoring Manual" to provide guidance."
The author emphasizes the need for more verification work, but the results indicate that it may provide a more reliable tool for assessing pain after castration compared to other routinely used methods.
Commenting on the study, Minero said: “A standardized horse grimace scale is easy for laymen to train and may be beneficial for those who manage horses that have undergone painful procedures.”
Dalla Costa E, Minero M, Lebelt D, Stucke D, Canali E, etc. (2014) Development of the Horse Grim Face Scale (HGS) as a pain assessment tool for horses undergoing conventional castration. Public Science Library One 9(3): e92281. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0092281 The full study can be read here.
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