Introduction

Our missions at BestHorsePractices are to connect equine research with everyday interactions and to share the discoveries of good research with Regular Joe’s.

Today, we are pleased to feature a young man with his feet firmly in both BHP camps: horsemanship and science.

Fred Holcomb, a student at Davidson College in North Carolina, has excelled at English and Western riding, including a lengthy stint at the Alvord Ranch with Martin Black and seminar work with Black and Dr. Steve Peters. Read more about Holcomb.

At Davidson, Holcomb pursues a psychology degree with a minor in neuroscience. His senior thesis, including a summer research project on a Wyoming ranch, focuses on equine cognition.

Follow Fred will:

• give readers a window to equine research, how it is pursued and conducted.
• offer notions of how simple theories and ideas can be quickly complicated by the vicissitudes of horse behavior, the vagaries of the environment (including human handling)
• show us how these issues can be resolved objectively
• demonstrate how the scientific method plays out in the real world of horses and humans

Enjoy the series and let us know what you think!

By Maddy Butcher Gray

When I talked with Fred Holcomb this week, he was riding shotgun on an Iowa interstate with his friend and research assistant, Georgia McIntyre, at the wheel. They’re headed to the HF Bar guest ranch in Saddlestring, Wyoming.

After months of reviewing current literature and crafting his project, that’s where the rubber will finally meet the road. It’s where he and McIntyre, a Colgate University student, will work with young ranch horses and record data for his thesis on equine cognition.

Even for a small project like this, hundreds of hours of preparation were necessary. Holcomb spent months considering options and honing his focus. He applied for financial support from Davidson’s Abernethy Research Awards and successfully received a grant for travel expenses and equipment.

Holdomb told me he wanted to try to fill a hole in the current literature on ideal learning conditions for horses. He also wanted to direct his research so that it could provide insight and be meaningful to everyday riding.

Specifically, Holcomb will study the differences in learning with or without “dwell time” between learning sessions.

He writes:

Horses are used as work and companion animals all over the world and there are a number of different approaches to their training. As prey animals, horses are naturally quite fearful and a certain degree of mental pressure is necessary and inherent to any training regimen.

The project will evaluate two different training approaches (spaced and massed training) in an attempt to highlight a schedule that best minimizes physical and mental stress while maximizing successful and willing execution of a trained behavior.

The ranch horses will be used for daily, afternoon training trials. During the trials all the horses will be ridden and asked to cross an obstacle (ground tarp) as a training task. The study will be looking at the effectiveness of different training schedules within a single training session.

Read more: Mapping out the project. Getting friendly with the parameters.