What Does the Research Say About Cooperative Care for Horses?
Cooperative care has quickly become one of the most fascinating training methods in my repertoire. It's also becoming more talked about in conversations about ethical horse training and veterinary handling. The idea is pretty simple: instead of waiting until a horse needs a procedure and then relying on restraint or just expecting the horse to tolerate it, we can train horses ahead of time to voluntarily participate in their own care.
That might mean teaching a horse to stand for an examination, accept oral medication like dewormer, lift a hoof, tolerate veterinary equipment, or stay still while a procedure is performed. They're things that most horses have to deal with throughout their lives, but they often go under the radar when we're thinking about skills we need to train.
As a horse trainer and scientist, I am in the unique position to see a training method I'm curious about and then set about answering the question: what evidence backs this up?
That question became the basis of my first published research paper, co-authored with Dr. Temple Grandin: Cooperative Care in Zoo, Livestock, and Companion Animals and Positive Reinforcement in Horses: A Scoping Literature Review.
If you read the paper, you'll find that I don't actually write much about the existing evidence for cooperative care in horses. That's because one of the challenges with studying cooperative care in horses is that there simply has not been much peer-reviewed research on it.
That doesn't mean the concept is new, or that people aren't talking about it in other places. In fact, there are some great books, videos, and posts on the subject. Cooperative care has been used and studied extensively with other animals, particularly in zoos, livestock settings, and companion-animal care. It's just that, when it comes to horses, it hasn't been the focus of scientific articles.
So, with the published research being scarce, the review examined two related categories of scientific literature:
Research on cooperative care in non-primate mammals.
Research on positive reinforcement training in horses.
By bringing those bodies of evidence together, I could examine both what is already known about cooperative care in a wide variety of other animals (which acts as evidence for the efficacy of cooperative care in general) and combine it with what we know about positive reinforcement in horses (since positive reinforcement is how cooperative care is primarily trained).
What did we find?
Our searches initially identified 1,518 records, and 24 studies ultimately met the criteria for inclusion in the review.
One of the clearest findings was that cooperative care does have evidence, and a lot of it.
Across the cooperative-care studies included in the review, all the animals successfully learned the target behaviors. In other words, all the training was successful. Grizzly bears were trained for blood draws, giraffes were trained for hoof radiographs, lions were trained to offer their tails for blood sampling, and many more.
The specific procedures and species varied, but the overall results were consistent: animals can be trained to perform behaviors that make husbandry and medical care possible, all without force or restraint.
That is important because it changes how we can think about difficult care procedures. Instead of asking, “How do we restrain this animal well enough to get this done?” we can also ask, “What could we teach this animal beforehand to make this procedure easy for them?"
What about horses?
Because research specifically examining equine cooperative care remains limited, we also looked at studies examining positive reinforcement training in horses.
That literature reported several findings relevant to cooperative care, including:
increased motivation during training
training success with difficult tasks such as trailer loading and crossing a tarp;
greater desire to interact with humans;
reductions in undesirable behaviors; and
improved training efficacy.
Positive reinforcement is not synonymous with cooperative care, even though we often use positive reinforcement to train cooperative care behaviors. Cooperative care involves more than giving an animal a reward during a procedure. Voluntary participation, opportunities to communicate discomfort or withdraw from a procedure, and thoughtful preparation for the actual care task are important parts of the concept.
Still, this existing equine research gives us a good start when it comes to answering questions about equine cooperative care. We know positive reinforcement works in horses, and we know that cooperative care works in animals, so that gives us a pretty good idea about how cooperative care might work for horses
One of the most important things was actually what was missing
Perhaps the most interesting result of the review was the research gap. There was substantial scientific literature describing cooperative care in other animal species, and there is scientific research on positive reinforcement in horses. But peer-reviewed research specifically examining cooperative care in horses is limited.
Horse owners, trainers, veterinarians, farriers, and behavior professionals are already using variations of these techniques in practice. Yet many questions about equine cooperative care have not been tested. In future research, I (and researchers like me) can answer these questions:
Does cooperative-care training reduce physiological stress during veterinary procedures?
Does it reduce avoidance or defensive behavior?
Can it improve handler safety?
How long does training take?
How reliable are the trained behaviors when a real procedure is performed?
How does it compare with more traditional approaches to preparing horses for veterinary and husbandry care?
While it would have been great to find an existing body of research on cooperative care, the lack of published evidence marks an incredible opportunity to learn more about how we can make vet care less stressful for our horses.
Why researching cooperative care is important
Veterinary and husbandry procedures create a unique welfare problem because many of them are unavoidable. When we prepare our horses well for them, we can help prevent injury for our vets (which is especially important considering the high injury rates for veterinary professionals), lower stress for them, and make it a much more pleasant experience for everyone involved.
There are already a lot of great people practicing and educating about cooperative care for horses. I am one of many trainers who believe in and practice cooperative care. By adding to the research, I can help provide evidence to back up the people who are already teaching it. I can also answer questions about what's happening with the horse's physiology during cooperative care. Does it change their cortisol levels? Does it decrease fear and stress behaviors? Are handlers safer with horses who have been trained for cooperative care? They're all questions that I believe deserve some empirical evidence.
If you have any questions or want to learn more about how to train your horse for cooperative care, check out some of my other resources or reach out to me personally. I'm always happy to answer your horse training and behavior questions.
Read the paper here:
Maclin, K., & Grandin, T. (2026). Cooperative care in zoo, livestock, and companion animals and positive reinforcement in horses: A scoping literature review. Journal of Applied Animal Welfare Science.
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