Animals | Interview with Dr. Emily Kieson—One of the Authors of the Highly Cited Paper “Tend and Befriend in Horses: Partner Preferences, Lateralization, and Contextualization of Allogrooming in Two Socially Stable Herds of Quarter Horse Mares”

We recently had the opportunity to interview Dr. Emily Kieson about her paper “Tend and Befriend in Horses: Partner Preferences, Lateralization, and Contextualization of Allogrooming in Two Socially Stable Herds of Quarter Horse Mares”, which was published in Animals (ISSN: 2076-2615) in 2023 and has received a significant amount of positive feedback from readers.

The following is a brief interview with Dr. Emily Kieson:

1. Can you tell us a little bit about yourself and your current research?

I grew up with horses, but my original intention for the trajectory of my career was ecology, sustainable ecosystems, and more of a process-based approach to environments and animals on the system side. When I couldn’t find a job based on my undergraduate degree, I got into training and providing horseback riding lessons and became a full-time instructor and trainer for a while. It was during that time that I became very confused about the knowledge being taught in the industry; a lot of the instructors and trainers with whom I worked and under whom I studied gave me conflicting answers about the questions that I had regarding horses and humans and regarding the interactions between horses and humans necessary to obtain the results that people thought they were getting. It was also during this time that I was teaching a lot, and during my time as an instructor, I gave my students certain rules. A friend of mine who was a social worker said, “You need to get into equine-assisted work”, so my first thought was that if anybody knows what’s going on between horses and humans, it must be in this field. Then, I started to undertake training sessions in equine-assisted work to become certified in different models, and it was during that process that I realized that most of the models I was learning about were based on the same assumptions. I thought that answers would be found somewhere where they weren’t, so then I immediately thought, OK, I need to find this information, and if anybody has it, research must have it; somebody in the science field must be doing research on this. So I went back to school to get a graduate degree in equine science, thinking that I would find the research that I was looking for. It turns out it didn’t exist, or possibly it was in the very, very early stages. I went back to school again and got my master’s and Ph.D. to do the research—looking at equine behavioral psychology in the context of human interactions. What was missing was learning who horses are without people. If we’re going to learn who horses are with people and the types of relational dynamics that occur in human interactions, then we need to know who they are without us. So much of the research that I’ve been doing lately has been looking at who horses are without people from a relational and social perspective. Therefore, we can understand or better understand the behaviours and indicators of social relationships and bonding. This particular paper is part of that body of work. We’ve been studying all the variations in the different types of interactions that occur in that context, one of which is allogrooming. Now what’s interesting is that allogrooming is not the most common expression of social bonding, but it is one of the easiest ones to observe. The amazing complexity of behaviours and interactions that horses have with each other can help us understand horses’ emotional and social well-being within their social groups.

2. What inspired you to conduct this research?

I just knew that there was this void of information that I needed to tackle, and I ended up approaching it from a comparative psychology perspective, and that wasn’t intentional. This was because I was trying to find an animal behavior Ph.D. program that would allow me to attack this space, but I couldn’t find one because all of the equine Ph.D. program were pretty much focused on nutrition, physiology and performance, or reproduction. I was thinking, if I’m looking at horse–human interactions, maybe I would be allowed to attack it from the pair perspective, in which case I could try to get into a psychology program and then look at and then incorporate the animal behaviour perspective. I didn’t know anything about comparative psychology before I got into this program, but it ended up being absolutely perfect. I realised that instead of looking at horse–human interactions right now, I needed to take the human out of the equation and look at who horses are without people, and what that’s also done is it’s led me down this path to study horses as free-living as possible, so without domestic or human interference or interactions. Traditionally, equine science has focused a lot on physical welfare; it’s only more recently started to expand into the social and psychological and emotional welfare side of things. To do that, we need to know what those indicators are. We can look at physiological indicators and we can look at health indicators, but when it comes to social and emotional well-being, we need to understand the behaviours that are indicators of that, so we can make better choices and have better assessment protocols and create better conditions to facilitate and support that kind of well-being. We have traditional ways of training, which are based on using and shaping their behaviours to fit our needs. We know more about that now, which is fantastic. We have learning theory, and we have a better understanding of operant conditioning. But when it comes to that relational side, that part where we want them to have a relationship with us and we want to have a relationship with them, we need to understand more about how we fit into their world rather than how they fit into ours.

3. What do you think we can learn from your article?

The article aimed to find out if horses interacted with the same social partners during stressful and non-stressful situations and whether they interacted more often during these stressful events. It derives from comparative psychology and comparative neurobiology, and some of these are sciences that have been looked at again within the human world. So the idea is that under stressful conditions, we as humans have a tendency to gravitate towards people whom we see as close companions—they could be family members or friends, and we will engage with those individuals in a way that fits our social behavioural needs. Let’s say I’m a person who likes to talk and that’s my way of socially bonding. If something happens and I’m stressed, one of the things that I will do is call or talk to my closest friend. If it’s somebody I know well, I might give them a hug. The more stressful we are, the longer and the more intense that hug is going to be. Now, for these particular horses, what we really wanted to start out with was the fact that we have these socially stable herds of mares. Allogrooming is very easy to observe and measure in terms of frequency, duration, and lateralization. We set up cameras and captured a lot of footage of them in their big fields and these smaller confined areas. This gave us an opportunity to compare by looking at frequency, duration, partner preference, and lateralization, and what we were finding was that they still turned towards the same partners. Allogrooming itself was different within this context, and so the data that we obtained fit the same theory—on the comparative side of things: What is it about social mammals that brings us together, and how does that differ from humans? What does it look like in cows? How does it look in horses? We examined the indicators to help us better understand their world, to give us ways that we can assess their well-being and welfare within our domestic world, and also to open up our minds to other ways of looking at the ways that they live. Readers are able to paint a much better picture of how horses choose to live their social lives. We are hoping that we can eventually paint a much better picture of what this looks like with us and our horses and how we can better understand their world based on these behaviours.

4. What do you think made the academic community respond so well to your research?

I think because this is a different take on horses. It’s a slightly different perspective on horse behaviour and social behaviour. It’s not just how many times they allogroom or whether they allogroom more in stressful versus non-stressful situations but also the partner aspect of it where you’re bringing in this idea that horses have a choice and they’re willing to make those choices. This brings in another idea of the individualised approach to looking at horses not just as a population, not just as this giant species and population parameters and statistics, but as each individual having their own choices and watching them make those choices and why they make those choices. This research starts to bring in a different conversation within this field of horses and humans, and I’m not the first person to bring this up, but more and more research is coming out in terms of the types of conversations that are being had at the public and scientific levels. So maybe that’s why: because this does start to fill some of that little void of filling in those gaps of knowledge on who each horse is and then taking into consideration their individual needs, desires, and choices that they make within their social lives.

5. What do you think are the future directions for your research?

We’re working on a huge ethogram right now—we are examining the footage that we’ve been collecting over the last few years of free-living and wild horses, and we are building a big picture of all these behaviours. In the research literature, there are plenty of ethograms out there; some amazing ethograms have been produced by amazing researchers on agonistic behaviours, play behaviours, sexual behaviours, and all kinds of things. We don’t have a lot of information on the behaviours that are indicative of social interactions. We know about allogrooming as it’s easy to see, but it turns out there’s a lot more. I have an incredible team of research assistants helping me go through the mass of videos searching for things, everything from a newborn foal to an ageing stallion. At the same time, given what little we do know of some of these behaviours, we’re looking at certain populations of free-living horses or horses that haven’t had a whole lot of handling. We try to solve questions on how those behaviours manifest within that social grouping and how those particular groups have some interactions with people. We’re interested in if and when those behaviours come up with interactions with people. We’re also taking into consideration some of these behaviours when it comes to horse-human interactions within more domestic spaces, namely equine-assisted work and therapeutic riding, so that we can look at different opportunities to assess equine well-being in these spaces.

6. Why did you choose Animals as the best platform for your work?

There are three reasons: Animals historically has published some of my favourite papers. There have been some very well-known ethograms published in Animals, which I’ve constantly cited, therefore Animals have a special place in my life. This is the first reason. But it is not only because of very specific articles but also the fact that it is an open access journal. In a realm where the majority of the people in the horse world are not academic and they’re not attending a university, I think that they should still have access to really good peer-reviewed information, and Animals is all open access and allows people to access good information about these important topics. At Equine International, part of our goal is to only publish under the open access model, and it’s important to do that in a way that provides people the ability to read information without a paywall. The third part is that I provide manuscript reviews so I can receive vouchers that help me offset the cost. We are an independent research organisation, and we don’t have many grants, so it is difficult to afford the publication costs at a lot of the other journals, which become expensive. So being a reviewer allows me to offset that cost, which I am immensely grateful for because not only is it a good journal, but performing that work, we get to publish there without having to be out of pocket for so much money.

I haven’t encountered any issues in terms of working directly with Animals. It’s been a very straightforward, easy process, even on the reviewer side. I think that Animals is one of the few journals that gives reviewers the opportunity to be rewarded for their efforts and offset those publication costs.

7. What advice would you give to young scholars who are seeking to get into academia or would like to publish their work in academic journals?

Find people who share your passions, who want to work with you, who will support you during the rough times and who will help you navigate those difficulties as much as support you in the successes. It’s hard work, and it’s a rough field to be in. It can be discouraging, and it can be disheartening. It is not always rewarding from a lifestyle perspective, so you kind of have to love the process, whether that’s teaching researching or developing courses. You have to love the process and space. Besides that, foster good connections to create a support system within that space.