Stable Vices - Examples

Examples

Common stable vices include:

• Wood chewing: Gnawing on wood out of hunger or boredom. This habit can evolve into the more serious vice, Cribbing.
• Cribbing: When the equine grabs a board or other surface with its teeth, arches its neck, and sucks in air. This can harm the teeth and may lead to colic. Cribbing can be caused either by nervousness or boredom, it may release endorphins in the horse. Recent research suggests that cribbing increases salivation and may reduce stomach discomfort.
• Weaving: Rocking back and forth in a repetitive fashion, possibly a self-stimulating behavior. Weaving is often seen with particularly nervous animals, or those that do not get out of their stalls often enough. Problems with weaving can include weight loss and uneven hoof wear, unnatural stress on the legs and lameness.
• Wall kicking: Kicking the walls of its stall with hind legs. This raises the potential of damage both to the equine and to the barn. Usually this is caused by a lack of exercise and boredom. Wall-kicking is one habit that is often acquired by others in the barn once an individual starts doing it.
• Biting: A nervous or anxious equine may reach out of its stall to bite at passers-by, human or animal. Box stall designs that keep the horse from reaching its head out prevent harm to other animals, but some horses may attempt to bite a handler when the person enters the stall.
• Bolting feed: Eating food too fast without adequate chewing, this potentially can lead to certain problems in the digestive system including choke and colic.
• Circling: Like weaving, this is a repetitive movement, only the individual circles compulsively in its stall. This habit can also lead to weight loss and lameness.
• Pawing or digging: The equine may paw with its front feet. This can lead to abnormal hoof wear and lameness, and may also damage the flooring of the box stall. An equine that paws can dig a noticeable hole in a dirt-floored barn in a very short time.
• Masturbation: A male horse, either a stallion or a gelding, will use his abdominal muscles to rhythmically bounce his penis against his belly. Previously believed to be a vice caused by boredom, confinement, or discomfort masturbation by stallions and geldings is now understood to be a normal behavior. Furthermore, this behavior rarely results in ejaculation and does not impact fertility.

Other behaviors that arise from boredom or frustration may not be vices with health or safety consequences, but still present management challenges and there is little that can be done to stop them. These include destruction of buckets, mangers, and feed tubs; defecation in the manger or water bucket; dumping water buckets; sloshing feed in water and then scattering it on the ground, and so on.