Does It HURT?
Has your horse suddenly started exhibiting bad behavior during training? Or maybe he’s recovering from an injury and seems depressed. Could he be in pain? If only he could talk.
It turns out he can—we just need to learn how to listen. As a horseman, chances are you’ve spent a lifetime reacting to the position of your horse’s ears or the expression in his eyes. Recent research into equine facial expressions has taken that horseman’s instinct one step further with in-depth studies about precise movements of your horse’s face and what they mean.
In this article, you’ll learn about the Equine Facial Action Coding System (EquiFACS) and how your horse’s facial expression might be used to help determine what he’s feeling. You’ll also learn about other facial-expression research that’s helping to pinpoint whether a horse is feeling pain, and how you might use this information to evaluate your own horse.
Finally, we’ll take a look at what we still hope to learn about equine facial expressions, and what this might mean for horses everywhere.
The Science
Facial action coding (FAC) was first developed in humans in the 1970s. It involves analysis of the movement of every individual facial muscle, and
