New online course helps horse owners interpret equine behavior and emotional cues
by Heide Brandes
The bay gelding pins his ears and shifts his weight. His tail flicks once, then again. His handler reaches for the lead rope anyway, certain the horse is just being stubborn.
Dr. Kris Hiney has watched that scene play out too many times to count, and she will tell you the horse was not being stubborn at all. He was asking for help the only way he knew how, and nobody was listening.
“When we are unaware, that’s where we do a lot of mismanagement,” said Hiney, an associate professor and equine extension specialist at Oklahoma State University. “Making poor decisions, using too much punishment, not understanding horses expressing conflict behaviors, not recognizing pain.”
Hiney and a team of equine specialists have spent years developing a solution. RAiSE, which stands for Recognizing Affective States in Equine, is a self-paced online course that teaches participants how to read and respond to the emotional lives of their horses. The course is open to anyone who works with or loves horses, from seasoned competitors to backyard owners with a single animal they treat like family.
Most people who own horses know how to check body condition, manage hoof care and watch for obvious signs of illness. What they often miss is the more nuanced picture — the subtle language a horse speaks through his posture, his gaze, the set of his jaw, the way he holds his tail when something hurts.
RAiSE addresses that gap directly. Built on the Five Domains model, the modern scientific standard for assessing animal well-being, the course treats mental health as the overarching measure of a horse’s overall welfare. Every decision an owner makes, from feed schedules to training methods to social housing, feeds into whether a horse is mentally thriving or quietly struggling.
The course runs approximately five hours and covers the full spectrum of equine body language, including facial expressions, head and neck posture, stance, gait, tail carriage and vocalization. It also includes a section on pain recognition and abnormal states, and a final module that asks participants to assess how an individual horse interacts with other horses and with people.
Knowledge checks, video examples and real-world scenarios require participants to apply what they are learning rather than passively absorb it.
The course was developed with input from an instructional design expert and grounded in original research, much of it driven by OSU graduate student Amber Wells as part of her master’s program in animal science. Wells worked alongside Hiney and specialists from the University of Nebraska and Purdue University to build what amounts to the most comprehensive equine emotional literacy course available to the general public.
“We designed the course to help horse owners better recognize and respond to their horses’ emotional states and make more informed decisions about their care,” Wells said.
Individual participants can register through OSU Extension at learn.extension.okstate.edu. Equestrian clubs, university programs and other groups can access bundle pricing through Extension Foundation’s Extension Campus platform.
There is no prerequisite experience required. Hiney built the course to meet owners wherever they are, whether they have been around horses their entire lives or are still learning what it means when a horse lowers his head and sighs.
That sigh, it turns out, means something. So does everything else.
