Aplicação das técnicas de enriquecimento ambiental para equinos ("Equus caballus" Linnaeus, 1758) em uma escola de equitação

Abstract

Confined animals suffer from the lack of stimulation and opportunity to express natural behaviors. Therefore, environmental enrichment is essential in order to improve their welfare. With the goal of improving the welfare of confined equines, environmental enrichment techniques were applied on two horses, one being a gelding and the other a mare. Thus, individual ethograms were created and their behaviors quantified before, during and after the application of the aforementioned techniques. For the mare’s ethogram, eight categories and 29 behavioral acts were registered, and for the gelding’s, seven categories and 25 behavioral acts. Both individuals presented lower expression than what is expected for the species in the categories “Foraging” and “Social”. Among the other registered categories, for the female, there was a difference in allocated time before, during and after the enrichment only for “Grooming”, in which the expression decreased during the application of the referred techniques. For the male, variation happened on the different stages of the study for the categories “Comfort”, “Elimination” and “Grooming”, “Comfort” being more expressed before the enrichment, “Elimination” during the enrichment and “Grooming” after the enrichment. Thereby, both presented a low level of welfare, abnormal behaviors and stereotypies, but those decreased during the application of certain items of enrichment proposed, being two foraging and two sensorial enrichments, showing preference for foraging enrichments. Therefore, it can be concluded that the environmental enrichment increased their levels of welfare, even if temporarily, and if applied frequently in their routine, would tend to improve their quality of life.