Episode Details

Your horse grabs the fence board. Arches the neck. Pulls back, and you hear that low gulp of air.

What is that horse telling you?

For years we called horse cribbing a stable vice. Something to stop. Something to strap a collar around.

Dr. Carissa Wickens has spent her career listening to it instead. She is an associate professor of animal sciences at the University of Florida, and horse cribbing has held her curiosity since she walked into a field of ten cribbing horses as a PhD student at Auburn.

What she has found is tender, and a little unsettling.

Cribbing looks like coping. When these horses are allowed to crib, their heart rate and stress hormones tend to drop. Take it away, and many start weaving, pacing the fence line, calling for their friends.

The need stays. Only the outlet moves.

And once the behavior settles in, it seems to live on its own. The ulcer heals. The diet improves. The horse joins a herd. The cribbing remains, because the brain has learned something.

We talk about the study that found cribbers carry their own pattern of dopamine receptors. Why Thoroughbreds, Warmbloods and Quarter Horses turn up so often in the research. Why weaning is when so many young horses begin. How a high-grain, low-forage diet multiplies the risk. And the chicken-and-egg question every owner asks: do ulcers cause cribbing, or does cribbing cause ulcers? Carissa gives the honest answer, which is that the science is still out.

I bring my own lens to this one too. As someone who is neurodivergent, I see a coping behavior the instant I see a horse crib. Carissa brings the research to meet it.

Three words keep coming back. Forage. Friends. Freedom.

Everything else rests on that foundation.

If you have ever stood at the fence frustrated with a cribbing horse, this conversation may let you see that horse with new eyes. As Carissa puts it, when behavior changes, look past the horse. "It's something that's not going right in the horse's world."

Dr. Carissa Wickens is an associate professor in the Department of Animal Sciences at the University of Florida, where she leads equine extension and research in horse behavior and welfare. She earned her PhD at Michigan State University, studying cribbing alongside Dr. Cindy McCall at Auburn University.

In this episode you'll learn

Why a cribbing horse's heart rate drops while it cribs.

The dopamine receptor study that found cribbers' brains wired their own way.

What happens the day a crib collar goes on: weaving, pacing, calling for friends.

Why weaning, around five months, is when roughly one young horse in ten begins.

The diet change after weaning that multiplied cribbing risk fourfold.

Why the behavior outlives the ulcer that may have started it.

The questions Carissa asks first in every behavior consult, from diet to sleep to saddle fit.

Chapters

0:00 Cold open: "I can't crib right now, but I need to do something"

0:29 Meet Dr. Carissa Wickens

2:06 How a field of cribbing horses started a career

6:26 What a stereotypy is, and why wild horses don't crib

11:36 Coping, not a vice: dopamine and the cribbing horse's brain

17:58 Born sensitive: genetics, Thoroughbreds and what a crib collar triggers

25:10 Weaning, diet and when horse cribbing begins

31:13 Why cribbing outlives its cause: OCD, crib collars and ulcers

39:59 The gut-brain connection

44:38 Forage first: what horse owners can do

48:33 Rapid fire

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