The Initial Horse’s Postural Response to the First Session of the Dorsal, Ventral, and Dorso–Ventral Massage Techniques

Abstract

Since interest in equine manual therapy and rehabilitation is constantly growing, the need for quantification of the horse’s postural response to used alternative therapy has increased. This study implemented geometric morphometrics (GM) for a dorsal profile comparison between the horse groups. The dorsal profile was represented by the centroid size and the centroid shape. The horse groups were defined using four classifiers: horse’s age, height at the withers, time lap in the massage session, and technique of the massage (dorsal, ventral, and dorso–ventral). Out of a total of 900 photographs of 20 horses, 180 photos were analyzed using GM, including thirty landmarks. Variation of the principal components (PCs) representing consecutive dorsal profiles were reported for the first three PSs as 59.50% for PC1, 14.36% for PC2, and 9.01% for PC3. The dorsal profiles differed depending on the classifier ‘height’ in terms of centroid size (p < 0.0001) as well as classifier ‘time’ (p < 0.0001) and classifier ‘technique’ (p < 0.0001) in terms of centroid shape, but not depending on the classifier ‘age’ (p > 0.05). GM allows visualizing the differences in the horses’ posture resulting from the selected manual rehabilitation techniques. The quantification of the horse’s body posture in the studied protocol indicates horses’ body posture after being warmed-up and massaged using the dorso–ventral technique is the most desirable.