U of M Crookston Senior Alyssa Newburg, Maple Grove, MN, Conducts Undergraduate Research Project Examining Stress in Horses

2016 Feb 1

She has been riding since she was a ten-year-old, and when she talks about horses, you can sense the excitement she feels. University of Minnesota Crookston Senior Alyssa Newburg, Maple Grove, Minn., an equine science major, plans on becoming a veterinarian. Her longtime interest in animal medicine was cemented when she was in high school.

"I grew up wanting to become a veterinarian, but off and on, I wondered if I could handle some of the more difficult aspects of the career in medicine," she says. "I thought about surgeries and sharing a difficult diagnosis, and I didnt know if I could do it."

However, as a sophomore in high school, Newburgs six-year-old dog, Parker, was diagnosed with an aggressive form of cancer. It was a difficult time. "I tried to help him through the process and cared for him even though, we knew he was not going to get better," Newburg remembers. "Through that experience I realized that caring for animals was exactly what I wanted to do."

Newburg visited several campuses in the University of Minnesota system, but following her visit to Crookston, she knew where she was going to go. "I really like it here," she says." I like reading and learning independently, but I also like the active, hands-on experience I have had especially with the horses."

Last spring, Newburg began work on a research project focused on horses and their gait. Under the guidance of Assistant Professor Abdorrahman Alghamdi, she began the work of videotaping the horses used during classes on campus.

"We spent spring semester 2015 capturing the video and fall semester analyzing the videos, watching how much each of three horses, selected within a class, spent standing, walking, trotting, and cantering," she explains. "We wanted to evaluate how much physical work each of the horses was doing. This is because any horse program has to balance the needs of the horses to be fit with the needs of the people to learn and/or to make money."

Overusing the horses can lead to overtraining syndrome where they become edgy, unresponsive, or in pain. However, underusing the horses can mandate using many more horses than one should which will make the operation cost too high. Since it is common for people to rely on subjective means of determining horse use in riding, Newburg looked at it with a more objective, evidence-based means such as the actual duration at each gait and physiological parameters like heart rate.

In conjunction with Alyssas project, other students evaluated physiological indications of stress such as the vitals on each horse before and after class and together with the work of Newburg, they evaluated the level of the workload the horses experience in riding class. It took many hours to watch all the video so Newburg enlisted the help of her friends Allison Mangan, a senior equine science major from Madison, Wis., and Kayla Miller, senior equine science major from Warba, Minn. They timed how long each horse spent standing, walking, trotting, and cantering during a class session.

The results showed that during any given class about 81% of the time, the horse was either standing or walking, but this information does not tell the whole story. We have to also consider the riders and their level of experience as that plays into the horses stress as well, Newburg says. Every so many weeks during a semester the riding class increases in difficulty and the horse and rider both experience stress. We documented those cycles with the help of the instructor and coach to determine the timing of the increase in difficulty and its effect in our data.

Newburg has been selected to present at the National Conference on Undergraduate Research to be held at the University of North Carolina in Asheville this spring. She is also waiting to hear about her applications to veterinary school but still looking forward to spring semester. I will enjoy the semester because I only have horse classes left to take, Newburg says. I came to campus to gain experience with horses and I will be absorbed in that this spring.

Some day she hopes to own her own clinic and has long hoped to include a rescue shelter for animals as part of that operation. It feels strange to know that I am going into my last semester, she says. But, I am ready to graduate and excited to see what is next.