Olfactory Stimulation as Environmental Enrichment for Domestic Horses-A Review.

Animals (Basel)

Nucleus of Studies in Ambience, Bioclimatology, Welfare and Ethology, Faculty of Veterinary Medicine and Animal Science, Federal University of Mato Grosso do Sul, Campo Grande 79070-900, Brazil.

Published: October 2023

Horses constantly face several challenges inherent to the domestic environment, and it is common for the expression of their natural behavior to be drastically limited. Environmental enrichment has been suggested as an alternative to improve the captive situation of domestic horses. Among the recently proposed enrichment strategies, olfactory stimulation has emerged as a method for improving several aspects related to animal behavior. Olfaction is a sensory modality that plays a significant role in the expression of equine behavior, and in recent years, studies have shown that olfactory stimulation can influence the physiological and behavioral parameters of horses. This review provides current information on the anatomical particularities of the equine olfactory system, presents the physiological mechanisms involved in the odor detection process, and demonstrates how stress can interfere with this process. Finally, the use of olfactory stimulation as an environmental enrichment for domestic horses () is explored. The need for new studies that answer pertinent questions related to this topic is discussed throughout the manuscript.

Download full-text PDF

Source
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10603683PMC
http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/ani13203180DOI Listing

Publication Analysis

Top Keywords

olfactory stimulation
16
environmental enrichment
12
stimulation environmental
8
enrichment domestic
8
domestic horses
8
olfactory
5
enrichment
4
domestic
4
domestic horses-a
4
horses-a review
4

Similar Publications

Adult neurogenesis has most often been studied in the hippocampus and subventricular zone-olfactory bulb, where newborn neurons contribute to a variety of behaviors. A handful of studies have also investigated adult neurogenesis in other brain regions, but relatively little is known about the properties of neurons added to non-canonical areas. One such region is the striatum.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

[The role of volatile organic compounds in plant-insect communication].

Biol Aujourdhui

January 2025

Sorbonne Université, Institut d'Écologie et des Sciences de l'Environnement de Paris, 4 place Jussieu, 75005 Paris, France - Institut Universitaire de France, Paris, France.

Insects and flowering plants are the most abundant and diverse multicellular organisms on Earth, accounting for 75% of known species. Their evolution has been largely interdependent since the so-called Angiosperm Terrestrial Revolution (100-50 Mya), when the explosion of plant diversity stimulated the evolution of pollinating and herbivorous insects. Plant-insect interactions rely heavily on chemical communication via volatile organic compounds (VOCs).

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

The Drosophila melanogaster olfactory system is one of the most intensively studied parts of the nervous system in any animal. Composed of ~60 independent olfactory neuron classes, with several associated hygrosensory and thermosensory pathways, it has been subject to diverse types of experimental analyses. However, synthesizing the available data is limited by the incompleteness and inconsistent nomenclature found in the literature.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

High Antennal Expression of and Participate in the Recognition of Alarm Pheromones by Buren.

Insects

January 2025

State Key Laboratory of Ecological Pest Control for Fujian and Taiwan Crops, Fujian Agriculture and Forestry University, Fuzhou 350002, China.

Insects have highly developed olfactory systems in which cytochrome P450s (CYPs) were involved as odor-degrading enzymes throughout the olfactory recognition of odor compounds by insects to avoid continuous stimulation of signaling molecules and thus damage to the olfactory nervous. To understand whether the highly expressed CYPs in the antennae play an olfactory function in worker, in this study, we find six highly expressed antennal CYPs from the transcriptome of . Multiple sequence alignment and phylogenetic analysis divided them into two families: the CYP3 family (, ) and the CYP4 family (, , , ).

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Astrocytes help protect neurons from potential damage caused by reactive oxygen species (ROS). While ROS can also exert beneficial effects, it remains unknown how neuronal ROS signalling is activated during memory formation, and whether astrocytes play a role in this process. Here we discover an astrocyte-to-neuron HO signalling cascade in Drosophila that is essential for long-term memory formation.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Want AI Summaries of new PubMed Abstracts delivered to your In-box?

Enter search terms and have AI summaries delivered each week - change queries or unsubscribe any time!