I am not going to write a whole post about some of the scientific finds around cribbing as it has already been written. There is a link below to HorseHead Info which gives a lot of the basic insights into the behaviour of cribbing and what may be happening in the brain. In summary terms I think they summarise it very well with this statement:
“It’s important to think of cribbing from the horse’s perspective: I’m simply adapting to environmental stressors which limit my ability to take care of myself and cause me to seek solutions outside of my natural behaviours.”
When you have a cribbing horse the best solution is to do everything possible to return them to as natural an environment as we can manage, but this will not necessarily stop the cribbing behaviour.
Is there another step we can take? Is it possible to help the horse become peaceful with the event that caused the trigger for the horse to seek an alternative solution outside of natural behaviours?