“Dropping” in male horses during training: Part 2. Video observations
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Dropping (penile tumescence) in male horses has been related to the provision of food rewards but it is unclear why horses display this behaviour. The objective of this observational study was to characterize dropping in relation to other behavioural indicators. Trainers submitted videos of their training session with their horse (n = 24). Frequency of behaviours (oral, head position, tail swish), rewards (treats) and duration of penile characteristics (partial or full drop, flaccid or erect) were noted for multiple 2 min segments of the training session. Chi-squared analyses compared penile characteristics to rewards. A mixed model analyzed the effects of horse age and training segment on behaviours and penile characteristics. Dropping occurred 69 % of the time with either a flaccid or erect penis. In the first 2 min horses spent less time with a fully dropped and erect penis than later in the training session (p < .02). Horses 11–15 yrs were fully dropped (82 % of the time) and erect (65 % of the time) longer than older and younger horses (p < .0001). Horses spent less time fully dropped (15 %) when trainers did not use treats compared to when they did (42 %; p < .03). The number of dropping bouts did not differ regardless of whether treats were provided or not (p = .3672). Neither the use of touch (p = .6861) nor the use of the clicker (p = .3795) were related to dropping during training sessions. The horses exhibited shorter durations of being fully dropped (p = .0016) and fully erect (p = .0253) during afternoon training sessions compared to morning and evening training sessions. No stress-related behaviours (head positioning, tail swishing, lip licking) were related to dropping (p > .05) however lip licking did occur more frequently during the last two minutes of the session (p = .0003). From these observations it can be suggested that dropping is not a sign of stress but may relate to the affective state of the horse.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".