ABSTRACT
This chapter offers the types of responses to calm and appease the other person or people in order to achieve or maintain a positive living environment, protect any social relationships, and prevent negative escalations. Just like humans, dogs, and undoubtedly many other mammals, horses also use these calming signals. Good, stable friendships and familial relations ensure safety, a good life, and survival. In addition to calming people, animals, and other environmental stimuli, calming signals have one other important function: they reduce the horse's own tension. A horse shows a pendular pattern when he displays ambivalent behaviour, when multiple behaviour systems are active consecutively or simultaneously, and the horse feels contradictory motivations. Calming signals can be seen in all possible head-neck positions: low, mid-low, horizontal, mid-high, and high. Blinking is one of the smallest calming signals. Horses naturally eat in a herd, so eating grass is something they naturally do together.
