Gait Analysis of Horses

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Gait and movement pattern are essential to the horse, whether it's a question of the horse's well-being, competition riding or breeding. For the first time, new research made in collaboration between University of Copenhagen and The Royal Veterinary College in the United Kingdom makes it possible to use sensors to accurately measure a horse's movements and to quantify limb movement outside the traditional gait laboratory. This provides veterinarians as well as breeders and trainers with a number of new possibilities. The new results have just been published in the Journal of Biomechanics.


Horses who develop a limp are one of the major sources of frustration for horse owners as well as vets. The same applies for Wobblers disease (ataxia) where growth abnormalities or articular process joint osteoarthritis put pressure on the spinal cord causing ataxic gait. At least one in a hundred horses develop Wobblers disease, which often leads to the horse having to be euthanased. Both lameness and Wobblers disease have an effect on a horses gait, and so far veterinarians have only been able to study horse movement in a gait-laboratory, which commonly only allows study of a few steps at a time on a straight line.

Using inertial sensors; small sensors containing technology like what you find in a cellphone, i.e. gyroscopes, accelerometers and magnetometers, veterinarian and PhD from the Faculty of Health and Medical Sciences at University of Copenhagen, Dr. Emil Olsen and his collaborators from Dr. Thilo Pfau's research group at Royal Veterinary College in the United Kingdom have managed to measure horse movement (displacement) as well as the timing of the hoof's contact with the ground very accurately.

"Our previous research shows that inertial sensors placed right above the horse's fetlock joint can be used to reliably determine the timing of the hoof's contact with the ground. Furthermore, we're a big step closer to being able to measure movement during training of a horse under real-life conditions, because we have also managed to validate the method against the reference standard motion capture, and this provides us with tools to evaluate the development and change in coordination and symmetry simultaneously," Doctor of Veterinary Medicine and PhD Emil Olsen explains.

End in sight for painful branding of semi-wild moorland ponies

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Exmoor ponies on the Stiperstones Hill in Shropshire. Photograph: David Bagnall/Rex Features
For decades the semi-wild ponies found roaming across some of Britain's most beautiful moorland have been identified by the branding on their flanks made with red-hot irons. The practice involves the application of very hot metal to the skin for several seconds until the hide turns a light tan colour.
But now the use of irons is on the way out, following a sustained campaign by animal welfare organisations that claim the practice harms the horses. The British Veterinary Association, which supports a ban, has noted that "hot branding is generally carried out without analgesia and is undoubtedly a painful process".
Moorland pony societies have agreed a code of practice on hot branding and have agreed to use the method of identification only when strictly necessary. The move follows a decision to ban the use of branding in Scotland and is seen as the beginning of the end for hot branding of moorland ponies.
An independent report in 2010 commissioned by the RSPCA concluded that the practice was "likely to cause significant pain and suffering". It recommended that horse-owners use microchips to identify their animals. Alternatively, they should consider freeze-marking – the use of a cold branding iron held on the skin to destroy the hair follicles and make a bald mark.

Horses Evolved 4 Million Years Ago

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The ancestor of all living horses, donkeys and zebras lived about four million years ago, suggests a new study, pushing back the confirmed age of the horse’s progenitor by two million years.

The discovery comes from the genetic analysis of a 700,000-year old horse fossil trapped in the Canadian permafrost. That’s hundreds of thousands of years older than any genome ever sequenced before.

Among other insights, the sequence supports the often-debated view that the Przewalski’s horse, native to the Mongolian steppes, is the last living population of truly wild horses in the world.

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And while the new study offers an intriguing look into the history of horses and how they have changed over millenia, the research also opens up the possibility of getting a much longer view into the evolution of all sorts of species, including people.

“This really shows that you can go much further back in time and do genomics than people previously thought,” said Eske Willerslev, an evolutionary geneticist at the University of Copenhagen. “Suddenly, that means that we can potentially go back and do the genome for precursors to Neanderthals. Maybe there’s potential for getting the genome of Homo erectus. From a scientific standpoint, this is really great.”

In 2003, Willerslev and colleagues retrieved a horse fossil from a site in Canada’s Yukon Territory, which contains some of the oldest permafrost on Earth. Based on volcanic ash preserved in the soil, the researchers estimated that the fossil was at least 700,000 years old.

When they scanned the bone for biomolecules, they were surprised to find both collagen and proteins, giving them hope that the bone might also still contain DNA, even though the oldest surviving DNA ever recovered from a fossil to date was only about 130,000 years old.

The team started with classic techniques to amplify DNA and build a genetic library, Willerslev said, but they ran into too much contamination. Most of the DNA they extracted belonged to microbes.