Samenvatting

In comparison to feral horses which spend 12-16 hours with feed intake behaviour and travel up to 28 km a day, nowadays management of the horse by humans has shortened its feeding time and introduced unfamiliar feed types, especially cereals containing a large amount of starch, protein concentrates and dried forages. The lack of chewing activity in horses can cause many health and welfare related problems in horses like stomach ulcers, colic, development of stereotypical behaviour and dental problems. Therefore, chewing activity of horses is an important parameter for health and welfare monitoring in horses. The aim of this research was to validate the EquiWatch as is a suitable tool for measuring equine chewing activity. This study has been set up in two separate trials to validate the EquiWatch system in two different settings. In the first trial the number of chewing movements (CM) registered by the EquiWatchSystem were compared with the number of chewing movements (CM) counted by visual observation to investigate the reliability of the counted chewing movements (CM). In the second trial the oral behaviour of the horses has been observed and videotaped to investigate if the classification of the oral movements of horses is comparable with the classifications made by the software used to analyse the data.