RedFlagMagazine

Anyone who owns a horse knows about “cribbing”. It’s something as a horse owner you fear your horse will develop one day – the same way you worry they will develop a weakness in their hocks making them no longer fit to be ridden or tooth decay so severe it will lead to an incurable infection. “Cribbing”, though, carries with it a stigma and a mystery as it spreads silently through barns – which horses are most susceptible is never really known.

What is cribbing? In the simplest terms, it’s when a horse finds a solid surface to sink their top row of teeth into, which usually translates to the rails of their cage-like enclosures. They then curve their necks, open their mouths wide and suck in a gulp of air straight through to their stomach. When they finish they release their jaw, their eyes take on a dazed look and their tongue hangs listlessly to the side of their mouth. The horse the owner is familiar with is, for a moment, no longer there. Instead, they seem half dead or halfway to another dimension. There is some speculation that the horse is getting high from an endorphin release, though this has never been confirmed and remains scientifically in doubt. However, it’s not uncommon for a horse to repeat the action immediately after the euphoria wears off. On a given day a cribbing horse can repeat the action over 1,000 times.

As time goes on the horse becomes a shadow of their former vibrant selves. We’ve seen this in humans who suffer drug addictions or people with mental illnesses that breakdown pathways in the brain. With noticeable personality changes also comes loss of appetite, difficulty digesting their food and eventually weight loss, loss of vitality, and even death.

If your horse is a cribber many who board their horses at barns will not allow their horse next to yours in the stable, nor do they want their horse to spend time out in the pasture near your horse. People fear the behavior can be learned, though evidence here also remains unconfirmed and mostly accepted by the scientific community to be untrue. What is known is that once your horse begins to crib there is no known way to get them to stop. The equine industry has developed specialized collars that literally choke the horse when they extended their jaw past a certain point, limiting the amount of air they can take in. It’s a little barbaric, but it’s the only solution at the moment.

Cribbing is just one of many ritualistic behaviors seen in animals that fall into the category of “Stereotypy”.

Stereotypic behavior is a term used to describe any repetitive physical movement, sound or behavior. In humans stereotypic behavior is often associated with mental illness. In animals it is associated with the effects of captivity.

Think of birds plucking out their own feathers and hopping around their cages incessantly or caged animals eating feces, each other, their caretakers and even themselves. Animals in captivity for entertainment, like cetaceans at aquatic parks, have been recorded repeating their tricks over and over in their off time sometimes leading to physical complications. There are also the physical signs of captivity like the curved dorsal fin of captive Killer Whales that collapse without the conditioning that the wild provides for the connective tissue that keeps it upright or the overall loss of body weight and muscular definition in wide-ranging carnivores in zoos.

Up until the early 1990s scientific study into stereotypy in animals was mainly focused on farm animals. Even then, interest was tepid and progress was slim due to lack of interest and funding. One of the main setbacks is that most scientific studies have tried to solve the problem rather than to understand its core processes. Stereotypy is an enigmatic dilemma and fresh scientific thinking has begun to agree that solving the problem is not really the most constructive direction. Anyone who has had any exposure to mental illness in humans understands that these are not always solvable problems in the traditional sense. We must address their roots before real progress can be made.

It would appear that the issue is much more nuanced and in some instances conventional explanations that the animals may be simply coping with bad treatment from their handlers or limited living space has been met with mixed data. Many of us project our own human mental processes onto the experience of stereotypy in animals and see a psychological darkness that may or may not apply. In fact, it has been recently suggested that cribbing in horses has some useful dietary consequences to their gastrointestinal health. A recent paper published in 2006 by Bergeron, Badnell-Waters, Lambton, and Mason entitled “Stereotypic Oral Behavior in Captive Ungulates,” hypothesizes that crib biting may be related to gut acidity and poses that animals may actually be self monitoring their own stomach health.

If there’s a place to start in understanding stereotypy it is in being the witness. When the proverbial tree falls in an empty glade no one will hear it. We cannot know the behaviors that form in animals unwatched in the wilderness. Within the “black square” though –  the space of containment  – whether it be a literal cage or the perimeters that societies and individuals place on people, spaces, and things – we can keep watch and take note. Stereotypy can be heard as a voice waiting for an answer, although spoken in a language not always easy to understand. As the witness, we are sometimes also the captor. If what we see compels us enough to remove the cage – whatever that cage may be – then that voice can finally be answered.