Faculty note: Dalke and Olson Hunt presentation on mustangs and domestic horses

Karen Dalke (lecturer, Public and Environmental Affairs) recently presented an article co-authored with Asst. Prof. Megan Olson Hunt (NAS and statistics) entitled “Becoming the other: a case study of mustang acculturation.” The presentation was given by Dalke at the Equine Cultures in Transition Conference, Södertörn University, Stockholm, Sweden. This year’s conference theme was human-horse relationships in theory and practice: changing concepts of interaction and ethics. Using the U.S. Geological Survey’s Ethogram for free-roaming feral horses, Dalke and Olson Hunt’s research compared the behaviors of Bureau of Land Management wild mustangs to those of domestic horses, categorizing over 26,000 images of these animals by behavior for analysis.