Development in technology has been continuously allowing us to make progress in fields which might not be expected when first thinking about technology. Yes, technology and medicine go hand in hand, with surgeons being able to operate more efficiently and with the creation of 3D-printed organs. When practical limits are reached, what is there for technology to do? Well, help us innovate and create new ways of helping one another.
With regards to equine care, researchers at the University of Sydney have committed their time to creating an application which can help determine the behavior of your horse. This is possible due to many years of human-horse interaction and many thousands of books about the subject. Likewise, like with every other database-oriented application, this one will also be fed a lot of data about horse behavior, already existing data, and new data to which you can contribute.
E-BARQ – Helping Horses Worldwide
The Equine Behavioral Assessment and Research Questionnaire is an online form which everyone can fill, anonymously, sending researchers very valuable data which they can use to better the application. The data will help fuel the research at the University of Sydney, a non-profit research, mind you, which will benefit all the horses.
In order to help, you can upload photographs of your horse, as well as videos, during training and competition, so that their progress can be tracked. You can share and compare your horse, especially useful during your first upload, to see how it compares to other horses, in terms of trainability, handling, boldness, rideability, compliance and most importantly, human social confidence.
This can immediately be shared, and there are two main benefits to doing this. The first benefit is that you can obviously compare your horse to many others and instantly get feedback. The second is a bit less helpful immediately and it will show, over time, the impact of traditional training methods as well as modern ones.
Safety for Everyone
Veterinarians are known to have been injured multiple times, especially when working with horses. They have a higher injury rate than firefighters, which is saying a lot. But, veterinarians can only do so much after a horse is healed from an injury. By using this application, you can help your horse stay healthy even after it has recovered from an injury. Your data would definitely be appreciated and would be helpful to everyone. Taking care of your horses should be a top priority, whether they are race horses or not.
With a little effort, you can also aid in the development of E-BARQ, an application and questionnaire which can help horses become better, as well as owners to recognize and adapt to their horses’ behavior. There is an app for everything, even horse behavior.
