facial hair whorls (trichoglyphs) and the incidence of motor.pdfVIP

Behavioural Processes 79 (2008) 7–12 Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Behavioural Processes j o u rn al h omepage: www.elsevi er.c om /locate/be havproc Facial hair whorls (trichoglyphs) and the incidence of motor laterality in the horse Jack Murphy ∗ , Sean Arkins Department of Life Sciences, University of Limerick, Limerick, Ireland a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t Article history: Several species demonstrate obvious motor laterality (sidedness, handedness) in their motor function. Received 29 March 2007 Motor laterality in the horse affects locomotion and subsequently equine performance during training Received in revised form 18 March 2008 and may have inherent safety implications for equitation. Some of the most commonly used identification Accepted 31 March 2008 features in the horse are hair whorls (trichoglyphs), since their specific location and character vary to some degree in every horse. We investigated the relationship between the hair flow of single facial hair Keywords: whorls and the incidence of lateralised motor bias in 219 horses when under saddle in ridden work. Horse The horses exhibited significant differences in motor preferences with 104 left-lateralised (LL) horses, 95 Laterality 2 Sidedness right-lateralised (RL)