Explanation
How Horses Communicate Within the Group
In horse groups, social communication is not limited to threats or fights: proximity and mutual grooming help form and maintain bonds, while tolerance and ambivalent interactions make their relationships more complex than a simple reading would suggest.
A Life of Relationships
Horses are social animals that often live in stable groups and form lasting affiliative bonds. The review notes that the need for social interaction persists in domestic horses, although some are housed individually with limited contact or in groups whose composition changes regularly.
Proximity and Grooming
Proximity and mutual grooming are examples of affiliative behaviors that can establish and maintain bonds. Horses also show a preference for associating with certain companions; familiarity and homophily—the tendency to associate with similar individuals—are among the factors associated with these reciprocal bonds.
More Than Approach or Conflict
Social interactions can be agonistic, affiliative, investigative, or neutral, and the review cautions that dividing them simply into positive and negative categories does not capture their full complexity. It describes ambivalent relationships and social tolerance: the latter is defined as staying near other horses around valuable resources with little or no aggression; it may depend on available space and social experience.
What the Research Shows—and Does Not Show
The review brought together 27 studies of adult social behavior, with observations of 851 horses in groups of between 2 and 33 individuals. In the behavioral repertoires described in those studies, 60% of the recorded behaviors were agonistic and 30% affiliative; however, the articles devoted a greater share of their methodological attention to agonistic interactions. The authors note that this emphasis contrasts with the rarity of agonistic behaviors in stable groups and call for observation repertoires that better represent affiliative, ambivalent, and tolerant interactions.
Interpreting Behavior in Context
A single behavior is not enough to summarize a relationship. The review proposes considering a broader repertoire of interactions and measuring aspects such as proximity, the frequency of behaviors, and their duration. This can provide a better description of dynamics between individuals and within the group without reducing them to a single signal or a simple opposition between friendship and conflict.
Sources
- Equine Social Behaviour: Love, War and Tolerance - PMC - NIH · pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov