You’ve seen it. The horse pacing the fence line, wearing a track in the ground. The one who calls out, again and again, when stabled alone. The horse who plants at the gate and won’t leave the yard, or who becomes so hypervigilant and spooky on a hack that riding him feels like sitting on a coiled spring. And the horse who used to do all of those things — and now, somehow, doesn’t.
We call these problems. Vices. Separation anxiety. Nappiness. We treat them as training challenges, management inconveniences, or character flaws. But most of us, if we’re honest, have a quieter sense that something else is going on — that the horse isn’t misbehaving, but responding. That behind the behaviour is something deeper that our usual language doesn’t quite reach.
That quieter sense is correct. And now there’s a word for what it’s pointing at.
The horse who stopped calling out
Think about that last horse — the one who used to pace or call when stabled alone, and no longer does. We often read this as improvement. The horse has settled. He’s adjusted. He’s fine now.
But consider another possibility: he has learned that he cannot resolve the problem. Horses don’t live in a world without predators — they live in a world where the herd makes any individual less likely to be the one that dies. Alone, that calculus changes instantly. The alarm his biology raised was not anxiety. It was arithmetic. That alarm went unanswered, again and again. So the visible expression of it faded. The behaviour stopped — why waste energy on something that cannot be fixed? The underlying alarm didn’t.
Apparent tolerance is not the same as absence of threat.
This distinction — between what a horse shows us and what is actually happening inside them — is at the heart of a new concept in animal welfare science: the teleonome.
But first, one idea that makes everything else click into place.
A horse’s feelings are not incidental. They are functional. Negative experiences — fear, pain, frustration — are the biological signal that something threatens survival and needs to be resolved, now. Positive experiences signal the opposite: things are working, keep going. Feelings are not decoration on top of biology. They are the biology, doing its job.
Which means when we suppress the signal, we haven’t solved the problem. We’ve just lost our view of it.
What is a teleonome?
The veterinary ethicist Bernard Rollin gave us the idea of telos — the nature of an animal, the set of traits and capacities that make a horse a horse rather than something else. Fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly, and horses gotta move, graze, stay vigilant, and live with other horses. Constrain those things, and you violate something fundamental, even if the animal stays alive and performs adequately.
Rollin was right. But telos named the destination without fully describing the system that drives the journey.
The teleonome is that system.
Pronounced tee-lee-on-ohm, it refers to the entire integrated biological organisation that makes the animal what they are — their anatomy, physiology, senses, emotional systems, and behaviour — all of it shaped together by evolution to pursue one fundamental goal: staying alive long enough to reproduce. Everything in that system exists because it worked, across thousands of generations, in the environments horses evolved to inhabit.
You can think of it as the biological logic that underlies everything a horse is organised to notice, care about, and act on.
Why the fence-pacer is not misbehaving
A horse separated from companions, confined to a stable, unable to move freely or monitor her surroundings, is not experiencing inconvenience. Her teleonome — the entire evolved system she is — is detecting a threat.
Isolation, for a prey animal whose survival always depended on the herd, registers as danger. Restricted movement means she cannot flee or reach companions. No foraging means the continuous low-level engagement her gut and nervous system expect is absent. Her teleonome responds the way it evolved to respond: it raises an alarm. She calls out. She paces. She hypervigilates. These are not behavioural problems. They are her regulatory system doing exactly what it was shaped to do.
The horse who has stopped doing those things has not resolved the problem. She has learned she cannot resolve it. That is not the same thing, and the difference matters enormously for welfare — because the regulatory system is still running, still detecting threat, still generating cost. It’s just that the visible signal has been suppressed.
This is why behaviour alone is an unreliable guide to welfare. What a horse will tolerate is not the same as what costs them nothing.
What the teleonome makes visible
The teleonomic lens doesn’t give us a new set of rules. It gives us a clearer way of seeing what was already there.
When a horse can move and explore freely, forage continuously, maintain social bonds, and respond meaningfully to her surroundings — when she can act on what she perceives as threatening, and engage with what supports her — her teleonome has room to function. Positive affect is generated. The system signals: things are working, keep going.
When those conditions are removed, the system doesn’t switch off. It keeps trying. If it cannot complete the work of keeping her safe and viable — if the movement is blocked, the companions are gone, the forage is absent — the alarm stays on. Tension accumulates. The regulatory cost mounts, whether or not anyone can see it.
Rollin told us that the “horseness of the horse” matters morally. The teleonome explains, biologically, why he was right: because the horseness of the horse is not a preference or a personality quirk. It is the evolved organisation through which the type of animal we call a horse regulates her entire existence. Take away the conditions that organisation evolved to work with, and you haven’t changed what she is. You’ve just made it impossible for her to function as she is meant to.
That is not a behaviour problem. It’s a welfare one.
Learn more about the scientific basis of the teleonome by clicking here.
Reference:
Wilkins CL, Henshall C, Lykins AD, Mellor DJ, Fillios M and McGreevy PD (2026) The teleonome: a framework for understanding animal welfare integrating adaptive capabilities, affective regulation, agency, and environmental affordances. Front. Anim. Sci. 7:1768519. doi: 10.3389/fanim.2026.1768519
