Pretty sure mine was thinking, “Whew. I barely escaped certain doom.” 
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This! There has to be some form of happy medium between, hey lets acknowledge discomfort (stress or pain) in horses and try to minimize it vs we should only do training based on consent. Might be flamed for saying that, but oh well.
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I 100% agree. Staying out of the rabbit hole is the hard part!
Here is my trigeminal nerve pain horse. Again this wasn’t a “mainstream thing” anyways. I did after awhile, thought he seemed in pain. But I will admit at first there was a lot of things that kind of made him seem cute! He used to hold his head really low all the time at rest. Unusually low. And he always had “floppy” ears, meaning they were wide at the base. And the wrinkle above his eye. He also started to let his "male member " hang out A LOT. CSU vet told me that sometimes they actually see that as a pain response, which was interesting.
He gave us a lot of other clues that he was uncomfortable though. The face was the last piece of the puzzle, really.
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HOSPICE. has a chart to teach caregivers. how to determine pain iñ a patient.
Some of the facial changes are so subtle that it takes a discerning eye and some practice in noticing the various changes in expressions.
Maybe we need a pain chart for horses.
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As I posted before, I agree with your sentiment bc I believe I grasp the general circumstances that you are grappling with.
However, l’ll use your comment as a jumping off point for general discussion.
Say I’m rehabbing a horse. In this circumstance, one might observe a “pain face” while endlessly walking and wonder if the horse is in pain. Alternatively, the face might actually be a “worried” one bc the horse has become say a bit barn/buddy sour during his stall rest and is perhaps a tad anxious about the exercise. Even if the horse was not barn / buddy sour prior to injury, that is no guarantee he isn’t anxious now.
So there is some value in considering if the horse is expressing physical pain or anxiety.
I would say for myself, that a horse that exhibits near constant expression of pain and/or worry is absolutely a call to action. But I might need more information to determine what that course of action is.
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There is one! https://horsesandpeople.com.au/the-equine-pain-face/ actually there’s multiple ones you can find. But again I think it’s only useful in certain ways.
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Sometimes I wonder if my horse is “pain face” is actually boredom face lol I’m keeping an eye on it though.
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If you know that there is an injury / lameness and this was not your horse’s normal face in this situation, I would assume so. But again I think it’s only a viable tool to assess a horse with other information.
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My Old Man puts this face on when he thinks he’s about to get worked (either a 45 minute walk or a 15-20 minute WTC session). No doubt he’s uncomfortable to some degree, hence his lameness that hasn’t changed for 8+ years now. However, he becomes SO stiff and SO uncomfortable if he isn’t worked, that it’s the lesser of the two evils.
When in his stall munching or turned out, he doesn’t exhibit the face very often. Maybe 1 out of 20 days, normally weather related.
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My very expressive horse makes this face all the time, whenever unsure of something in the training. Processing a new aid I’ve just introduced, a scary leaf, anything out of the ordinary. It’s not pain. It’s kind of like “I’m not so sure about this…” Sometimes her head is low and sometimes not. I have heard from some vets and anecdotally that they put their heads low to calm themselves.
BTW I am not discrediting what you noticed in your horse. Just that acute symptoms of stress in horses don’t mean the same thing for every horse.
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I’m trying to decide what I think about consent based training. TBH, I mostly gloss over the phrase as it reminds me of trendy buzzwords in the office. If I hear nimble one more time…
OTOH, an emphasis on “back to basics” and “reframing with positivity” are generally worth considering in the face of “problem” behaviors.
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Devils Advocate to the Devils Advocate. We still don’t know its not both. The horse could be worried about his friends now that he is on stall rest AND have some physical discomfort from the stall rest that isn’t showing up as an actual lameness.
Idk this is the path I end up falling down and I struggle to find an end to the path that isn’t all horses are in pain or uncomfortable.
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Very true a horse could easily be a little anxious and a little ouchy.
Or anxious about being ouchy (pain response behaviors lingering after the pain is removed). Which is difficult to asses but logically a possibility.
Theoretically speaking, even if our path leads us to a place where “all horses are in pain / uncomfortable / anxious” then we can still choose to continue forward with actions that alleviate pain / discomfort / anxiety. Acknowledging a vast opportunity for improvement is “ok”.
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This is where I struggle too. Anyone who’s ever been in physical therapy knows that there’s a certain amount of necessary discomfort when recovering and getting stronger. The same could be said for horses in rehab, or working on new skills that require different muscle activation. How many of us are striving to get our horses traveling straighter, more correctly over their topline, and/or with more engagement through the hind end? These can be physically difficult and may be uncomfortable to a horse who is accustomed to moving differently. “Pain face” in this context may or may not be a useful indicator.
On the flip side, horses can’t talk to tell us when something is more than just minor discomfort. It’s up to us to be attentive to their signals and trust our own guts when something feels off or wrong. I think expecting an athlete (human or equine) to have zero pain/discomfort is unrealistic, but it is our responsibility to work with vets/farriers/ other members of our horses’ care teams to mitigate it to the best of our ability.
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For me, what’s probably most useful (in this context) is observing how quickly/often/when a horse moves from “pain face” to “relaxed face”.
If my horse looks anxious / pained because I make an ask but is rapidly moving between relaxed and anxious / pained expressions as I apply and remove pressure then I’m not terribly concerned. I presume with careful repetition that the ask will trigger fewer and fewer anxious / pained expressions. Conversely, if my ask triggers anxiety that persists or escalates I then have cause for concern.
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Yeah this horse was constantly throwing himself in the ground and dragging his head so it was easy to discern that he was in distress/pain. That’s why I said it’s SO situational. You have to look for other symptoms not just pain face, for sure.
I would call it more of an “irritated face”. My horses have never had the droopy lip but they just have a pleasant expression unless something bothers them. When they display this face there is no guessing they are peeved big time.
In those instances it was:
- ears pinned, hateful eyes.
- turning to bite at me.
- maybe some tail swishing or picking up a back foot.
I have had 2 horses do this( in some fashion) in relation to saddle fit, girthing , mounting and riding in the past and since we have fixed the issue ( new saddles) the behaviors have gone it was almost immediately.
My gelding still gets the ugliest face when I am brushing and saddling him and either ( or both) of my mares come close to us. It is like he feels that is his time with me alone.
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My second horse had a fixed bone chip (inoperable) in his hock. I owned him for eight years before we found it. He was always worried (eye wrinkles) and quite spooky - though he did learn to overcome that to a great extent.
I could tell when riding how much his hock was bothering him, and found that he was more spooky on the days he wasn’t feeling good. He would also race back to the herd on those days, and saunter on good days. The faster he went, the more uncomfortable/painful? he was.
My theory is that his subconscious knew he was compromised, and the most likely to get caught when the wolves attacked, and was keeping him alert so that he would be running before anyone else knew the wolves were there. Basically greater vulnerability induces greater anxiety/awareness - which we see in the worried/anxious/painful eye.
My third horse was a Wobbler, diagnosed at 14. He too was an anxious horse, and also learned to overcome it to a great extent. I did not ride him, or do much of anything with him in his last six months. He didn’t seem to be in physical pain most of the time (except when he actually hurt himself) but there were days he was clearly unhappier than others. He still did all the things - run, buck, rear, roll, eat, play, etc - that indicate “pasture sound”.
This is why you don’t talk about how your horse is doing, and if he’s pasture sound with other boarders. They see your horse doing all the things, and maybe being grumpy for grooming. They don’t watch long enough, or with sufficient attention to notice the more subtle signs, so to them he’s fine.
He was not fine. I don’t know how much actual pain he was in, or how much of his discomfort was from suddenly receiving full nerve stimulation from somewhere that usually only provided an irregular or partial signal. Or losing nerve signals and having his subconscious poke him into the vulnerable alert position. Nobody watching him in the field as they walked by would have seen any of that.
We have to see it in our own horse, and try to figure out what contributed to the uncomfortable days. If we can’t help, then we have to try and work out how often/when those days will occur in the future and make the euthanasia decision before the horse is having more bad days than good, regardless of what casual observers might think. And regardless of that little voice that says “He’s much happier with a warm blanket, maybe that’s all he needs” when you know he doesn’t do well in the cold and he’s already wearing a midweight, and it’s only 10C, and there’s four months of subfreezing temperatures starting in less than a month… Or whatever your horse’s thing is.
My point is lost. I think it was that discomfort face isn’t necessarily pain of the sprained ankle type “ouch, that hurts” nerve signals, but lack of that type of pain doesn’t mean pasture sound either.
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Amen. I wish I could hear this three more times.
