Keep Horses Calm with Desensitization Training

According to a recent study, doing some at-home preparations could aid horses in staying calm when faced with
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Look around at a horse show and you’re bound to see one horse spooking at a porta-potty while another walks calmly by. Is it possible to help your horse behave more like the latter horse than the former? According to a recent Danish study, doing some at-home preparations could aid horses in staying calm when faced with new or potentially frightening objects.

Janne Winther Christensen, PhD, a research scientist at the faculty of agricultural sciences at Aarhus University in Tjele, Denmark, and colleagues recently completed a study in which they examined if "habituation" to new or frightening objects during training could horses respond to novel objects in a more relaxed manner.

Christensen and her team separated 30 1- and 2-year-old horses into two groups: one test group that was "habituated to a complex object, comprised of five simple objects of varying shape and color," and one control group that was not habituated to the object

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