Saturday, May 10, 2014

Why Horses Hide Their Pain




“The difficulty with evaluating pain in horses is that they cannot tell us how much pain they’re in or where it hurts,and that’s complicated by the fact that horses are prey animals, and they will naturally tend to hide their level of pain as a survival mechanism.”

It would seem some of our best athletes....the naturally superior prey specimens.... hide their discomfort better than the rest. 

The horses I feel for most are not the ones who are 3 legged lame. Those get prompt attention by their caregivers. 

No, the ones I feel for are the ones who go out and win and win and win and because they win, their caregivers assume they must be comfortable. Those are the naturally gifted prey animals that survive in spite of their pain!

Little do their caregivers know how good these horses can be if someone would only find the source of their discomfort.