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February 2008 • VOLUME 30 • © HORSES For LIFE™ Magazine
The Need for Sleep In barns across Europe, in city after city where literally hundreds of thousands of horses lived out their lives as taxis, laundry haulers, coal deliverers, delivering everything from milk to the goods that the industrial factories required on a daily basis, they were your bus, your semi-truck, your car to run to the store, they literally were everywhere. And in the process, the barns needed to fit in as many horses as possible. Tie stalls are an obvious answer to the problem. The horses out working all day long, at night in stables in the cities and in barns in the country, needed little room to move around as they were well tired and only needed sleep. Even today many barns incorporate tie stalls. One of the most fascinating facts to many is how the horse can sleep standing up. It almost appears magical. The science behind the magic is the horse’s ability to lock his front knees and to take one ligament in his back leg and hook it over his hock. A stabilizer or locking mechanism if you wish, that enables the horse to stand while sleeping. Because of this mechanism, and it seems some horses' preference for sleeping standing up - that for years, perhaps even centuries, it was thought that there were some horses that really didn’t like to lie down to sleep or even need to lie down to sleep. It made so much sense. After all, what prey animal wants to be lying down, making it easier for the predators to attack? Making tie stalls a natural outcome. WHAT WE KNOW ABOUT SLEEP IN HORSES Well, it actually turns out that horses need three different types of sleep, for a total of about four to five hours of sleep a day. “Sleep is commonly defined as a period of immobility in which individuals seem unresponsive to their environment. Sleep now is accepted as a behavior with clear physiological necessities that are not fully understood, but which when lacking have clear dysfunctional effects. As a component of a single day, it is estimated that horses require 2 hours of drowsiness, 3 hours of slow wave sleep, less than 1 hour of paradoxical sleep, with 4 hours of total sleep time. There is no definitive explanation for the necessity or the function of sleep in horses, or for that matter in all other species.” THE STATES OF SLEEP “Sleep is divided into several different states that include slow-wave sleep (SWS), paradoxical sleep (PS), and REM sleep. During REM sleep, the EEG pattern resembles that of wakefulness, despite the fact that the individual is deeply asleep.” According to J.J. Bertone of the College of Veterinary Medicine of the University of Health Sciences Pomona, California, the need for, or the lack of sleep “are not broadly widespread areas of concern in veterinary medicine and surgery. There is a seemingly traditional unconcern and dismissal of the clinical ramifications of sleep on performance and clinical outcome associated with these areas of essential, sustaining, recuperative, physiology in the veterinary clinical literature.” Doing without some of the different states of sleep means that the horse could be suffering from sleep deprivation. Horses have three different basic positions for sleep. It is important to know the three basic reasons the horse might not take one of the positions needed to get the type of sleep that they need.
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