Employment in the equine industry in 2022: Insights into career types, salaries, and benefits.

The equine industry contributes $74 billion and provides 1.3 million jobs annually to the United States economy. However, limited information is available on the current salaries and benefits of equine professionals. In 2022, an online survey was conducted to assess salaries, benefits, and education levels of equine professionals across several career types in the equine industry. The survey consisted of 38 questions with conditional branching and was distributed through social media and e-newsletters. Survey branching focused on grouping participants by career type into the following categories: farm management, government, industry, nonprofit, private practice, and university. The most prevalent career type represented was farm management (34%) followed by private practice (18%), academia (17%), industry (15%), nonprofit (12%), and government (4%). Associations between variables were examined with Chi-squared analysis. An association was observed between education level and salary (P = 0.001, X2 = 103.17) with salaries greater than $50,000 being more prevalent with advanced degrees. Similarly, job type and salary were associated (P = 0.001, X2 = 73.47), where salaries for academia and industry careers were often greater than $50,000 and nonprofit and farm management salaries were more often less or equal to $50,000. Compared to professionals in farm management or in private practice, those in academia and government received more benefits (P<0.05). Data collected from this survey creates a baseline for evaluating compensation across the equine industry and exposed opportunities for improvements in future surveys. Outside of industry salary comparisons, survey data can be used by educators to emphasize the benefit of further education to increase salary and benefits.

Are Users Good Assessors of Social Dominance in Domestic Horses?

Horse users and caretakers must be aware of the risks of mixing social groups. The current study investigated whether eight equine practitioners can assess the social dominance rank of 20 horses. The horses' feeding time and agonistic/aggressive and submissive behaviours were observed during the feed confrontation test, and the dominance index (DI) was calculated. Kendal's W, Spearman correlations and factor analysis were applied to test the raters' agreement, the relationship between dominance ranks and the behavioural variables, and to determine the clustered behaviours. The agreement between all raters in the classification of dominance order ranged from moderate to perfect. The ranking by every rater was strongly and negatively correlated with the time of eating in feed confrontation tests and with the DI, evidencing shorter feeding times for more submissive horses. The withdrawal of the horse when threatened was the behavioural variable that was most often correlated with raters' ranking. The current study confirmed the abilities of practitioners to categorise the horses under their care according to their social interactions. Additionally, rolling when denied access to feed was proposed as frustration-releasing (redirected) behaviour.