While not much gets past WUWT, this story from Portugal has only recently gotten some press, well after its posting in March, and I think it warrants attention here. While I don’t know much about horses, I’ve known several people who do, so I do know that just because a horse will let you ride it, it may look for a low hanging branch to walk under to scrape you off.
Not surprisingly, I had never heard of “Acquired flexural deformity of the distal interphalangeal joint,” but I came across a web page, Can Wind Turbines Cause Developmental Deformities In Horses? about a stud farm where horses developed downward pointing front hooves after several wind turbines were built nearby.
If I were a horse, I would not want my feet to look like the one on the right:
No other changes in rearing the Lusitano horses (a famous Portuguese horse breed that I never heard of) were known. In the ensuing investigation, “two of the affected foals were placed in a pasture away from the initial one and two others were admitted at the Faculty of Veterinary Medicine of Lisbon. In those animals, except for one that had to be euthanized for humane reasons, an improvement was observed on their condition, with partial recovery of the deformity.”
The stud farm was studied as part of a masters thesis by Teresa Margarida Pereira Costa e Curto and it surmised:
Cellular Mechanotransduction is the mechanism by which cells convert mechanical signals into biochemical responses. Based on the mechanical effects on cells it was proposed in this research project that the ground vibrations were responsible for a increased bone growth which was not accompanied by the muscle-tendon unit growth leading to the development of these flexural deformities.
That sounds reasonable to me, I know that stressing human bones increases their calcium uptake, and I wouldn’t be surprised that something like that could affect feet in other animals.
The wind turbines are obvious prime suspect, they were built nearby:
So, WUWT readers who actually know something about horses, have you heard of this case or similar cases at other farms with new wind turbines? Or, if you live near wind farms that are near farms with horses, cattle, etc, have they had problems like this?
This is just one study, involving one farm and not very many horses, clearly more research is warranted. If it’s confirmed, it would be interesting to know if other animals are susceptible to a similar problem.
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I have no problem with the question Ric asked, and and am somewhat surprised that some are offended. Even if the proposed cause-and-effect relationship is proven invalid, we learn a lot more than we knew before in the process. Do the offended have a problem with learning new things?
One thing people are failing to consider is that the ailment may not be caused by a physical trauma. There is no phyical wound; no bruise or blood. Rather the retraction of the tendon (and resultant imbalance in tendon versus bone growth) can be caused by the animal wincing.
For example, if I were to sing to you all softly, there would be no physical damage done, but the wincing might cause pulled muscles and damaged tendons, and bald patches where hair was ripped out.
Haven’t they done studies where plants are grown in different settings with different music played in the background? We need to add a group of plants grown with the thud-thud-thud of a wind turbine in the background.
Send me the money, and I’ll get to work on it. But you can rest assured I’ll do the study where I myself don’t have to listen to the thud-thud-thud.
Phlogiston says;.
Thanks for the clarification – and glad you are familiar with it – probably much more so that I am !
On the veterinary side – I am out of touch with the latest research nowadays – I was due to study veterinary at Cambridge (a very long time ago) but got sidetracked showjumping and teaching in Canada and the US. A cousin is responsible for managing the stallions and the breeding programme at what is probably the best known stud in ireland and maybe in the world – but he does not come across this condition at all.
If you are interested in low frequency / ultrasound from wind turbines here is a link to the Keele study I mentioned .
http://www.keele.ac.uk/geophysics/appliedseismology/wind/Final_Report.pdf
I’ll just point out that there are other relatively common sources of vibration (railroads,especially those transporting heavy freight, come to mind), and I have never heard of such maladies being ascribed to those sorts of sources. I really seriously doubt that the wind turbines have much if anything to do with this problem.
Interesting. Elephants hear with their feet, so anything is possible, right? But as much as I’d like to blame windmills —in fact, *because* I’d like to blame them– I would want to see a lot more science here. Hard to construct (and fund) the gold standard of several randomized double-blind trials with enough statistical power to support or reject the null hypothesis (windmill vibes do not cause funny horse feet). So we may never know “for sure.”. But I am prepared to entertain the argument that chronic subsonic energy fields can affect living things in close proximity. You couldn’t pay me enough to live near a windfarm.
If there’s anything to it, it’s probably due to the effects of low-frequency vibrations in the air, which are known to cause all kinds of health problems for people and animals. Since wind turbines turn at low frequencies, and low frequencies can travel long distances, this could be a real factor to contend with. The army has actually researched the use of low frequency vibrations as a weapons system, and found it quite viable.
Read an article several weeks ago that claimed that perhaps half of whooping crane population has apparently gone missing, presumed dead, and also presumed the victim of wind turbine. Population was, I believe around 160 (pairs?) up from a low of 26 pairs during the 1950s.
Also saw an article the other day that cited American eagle deaths due to wind turbines. Where is the Audubon Society, which I believe has supported wind turbines?
Thanks – I was going to mention to Gareth Phillips myself. The bird kill numbers have so many problems that this horse research would appear to be stellar by comparison. There’s a wind farm that’s fairly close to me but the turbines are on private property and no one is studying the the bird or bat issue there. Even where there are ground studies, they’ve been criticized for looking at too small a “throw radius” and here in New Hampshire researchers would have to compete with our coyotes for the carcasses.
It seems to me people could attach vibration sensors on to turbine blades (the inside of the blade is accessible through the nacelle) and then measure the impulses from impacting hawks. Bats might be too light, especially those that died from non-contact pulmonary damage.
Of course, turbine owners have a strong disincentive for doing any bird kill study, so I fear our data on that will continue to be all over the place, as numbers in the comments above indicate.
As for the Audubon Society, the “smaller” (than Greenpeace or the WWF) conservation groups seem to work together on several issues, it’s the only reason I can think that Audubon is ignoring the issue. If the decline in Whooping Crane counts continues and is shown to be turbine related, that could change quickly.
A group I hadn’t heard of before, American Bird Conservancy, seems to be taking a reasonable position on things, check out http://www.abcbirds.org/abcprograms/policy/collisions/wind_policy.html -Ric]
I actually study the low frequency vibrations and have sample recordings and analysis from Industrial wind turbine (IWT) sites. (I despise the term “wind farms” — nothing green about them) Most recording equipment does not have a low enough frequency response to measure the noise accurately.
Much of the noise is in “seconds per cycle” — as opposed to “cycles per second” — this is because the energy from the wind turbines forms beat notes with each other and there are “pockets” where the noise is the resultant of the patterns from all wind turbines — additive and subtractive.
While the infrasound issue is becoming better understood, we do know that it does not affect everyone.
A local (Ontario, Canada) researcher has shared some of his files with me and I ran them through my custom analysis software — which seems to perform much better than Fourier analysis at picking out the low frequency noise and the harmonics.
I saw that article some time ago. I neither “believe or disbelieve” at this point. All we know (personally) at this point is that people who get vertigo from seismic waves or get dizzy due height are more likely to exhibit other symptoms from the low frequency noise generated by wind turbines.
Mostly I study the power output and the cost. The health issues should be non-issues. They are such a drain on the Ontario Canada economy due to subsidies and having to pay NY and Michigan to take the unneeded energy that one can only wonder why we want to install 10 times more IWTs.
[One thing I wonder about is the vertigo effect, and related stress on the horses. Being bipedal, humans may have a much greater reliance on balance organs than quadrupeds, they can get a good idea of their balance from comparing pressure on each foot. -Ric]
@Ric Werme, It’s the first time I’ve read about this happening between horses and wind-turbines, I know a few people who own horses where I live, I’ll ask about and let you know if I find anything.
Have you heard of any link between offshore wind-farms and beached whales/dolphins etc…
I only have a suspicion that offshore wind-farms are disrupting marine life but to me its common sense, and its well known that these animals are extremely sensitive to sound vibrations and echoes, my thinking is if a pod of dolphins can’t communicate with each other due to the noise of an offshore wind farm, the pod of dolphins may become disorientated change its usual course to avoided it or become separated trying to find a quieter spot away from the noise and vibrations, this may lead dolphins into shallower water and quieter bays where they are likely to become stranded by unpredictable or unfamiliar tides.
“Acquired flexural deformity of the distal interphalangeal joint,” in horses is usually due to too much ballet dancing “on point” before complete calcification of the chondral growth areas of the involved bones, leading to extensor tendon collapse!.
But I have indeed been very worried about the effect on whales of near-costal vibrations emanating from off-shore windmills which have no doubt already led to an epidemic of “beached whale syndrome”, such that when the Starship Enterprise returns from the future to collect a whale in order to fend off the doomsday machine, all it will find is those got dam windmills!
People have a point of confusion when comparing wind turbines to truck or rail noise. That truck noise is intermittent — however loud. Train noise does indeed cause LFN/Infrasound (Low frequency noise) that can last several minutes — but not for many hours or days — as IWTs do.
Some times the wind does actually blow strongly for days at at a time. Then the infrasound is present for some days. The noise from many turbines can combine and form “pockets” of high intensity low frequency vibrations. This much is known and generally accepted.. Whether it can or could or does cause the symptoms in the article is another question — one I can’t answer.
Some people can sense the vibration — but you do not hear it except as “pulsations” on top of the jet engine like noise of the turbines.
Caleb says:
September 27, 2013 at 4:14 am
I had the same thoughts last night. Whenever I see one of the monstrosities I wonder what is the psychological response in people exposed to them permanently. And would a test sample of dishonest climate hacks confess if they were penned near one of them for a month? The problem would be, of course, that the turbines would not run reliably enough during the clinical trial period. And how would I evaluate the results if the test sample wouldn’t confess but grew crocked feet? I’m still working on it.
Oops, it looks like Sparks has just barely beaten me to it, so that Sparks is going to be the next Nobel Peace Prize recipient..which may not be a good thing.
@gareth Phillips
Interesting comparative figures of associated bird deaths and structural causation. I didn’t realize that the ratio of every other causation factor induced mortality to wind mill induced mortality was so high. Interesting information.
I have to ask about the ratios though.
ratios of mortality between specified causation factor and wind generators
Lighted Communication towers 1000:1
Automobiles ____________________ 2000:1
Power Lines (and assoc.equip.) 4000:1
A 2000:1 mortality causation ratio seems quite damning on the surface (strictly by the numbers)
But what is the feature to feature ratio?
I can guarantee that if you were to factor in the prevalence ratio (cars certainly outnumber wind turbines by a greater factor than 2000:1) it would indicate that, if wind turbines were as common as the other causality factors they would be far more deadly.
Gene Selkov says:
September 27, 2013 at 4:12 am
“ultrasound in air dissipates very quickly. In any is produced by a turbine, it will drown in thermal noise within metres from the source. I’ll give it 10-20 metres in the longwave range (20-30kHz); for 1MHz, it will be a fraction of a millimetre.”
Point is it is not ultrasound in air but ultrasound through the ground. The Keele study showed the dominant wavelength through seismic measurement at 1km distance was 0.5khz.
Have a look at their report and you will see for yourself :
http://www.keele.ac.uk/geophysics/appliedseismology/wind/Final_Report.pdf
[The title of that paper is “Microseismic and Infrasound Monitoring of Low Frequency Noise and Vicrations from Windfarms.” I see references to “ultra-sensitive,” “ultra-low,”, and “broadband 120s to 50Hz”. Ultrasonic frequencies are higher then human hearing, and I used to be able to hear 19kHz. 50Hz is very high for seismic analysis, frequencies above that dissipate very quickly. There’s no good source of ultrasonic sounds in a wind turbine, and if there were, people would not be measuring them with seismometers. -Ric]
Old England commented:
> Point is it is not ultrasound in air but ultrasound through the ground. The Keele study showed the dominant wavelength through seismic measurement at 1km distance was 0.5khz.
>
> Have a look at their report and you will see for yourself :
> http://www.keele.ac.uk/geophysics/appliedseismology/wind/Final_Report.pdf
I am sure you meant “infrasound”. We’re done with ultrasound: it does not propagate. You can’t sense an ultrasound siren 1 km away, even through the ground. Through water or a continuos steel rail, you can, but sand, soil, clay and fractured rocks kill ultrasound very quickly.
Regarding infrasound, the report you cite is very interesting (I particularly liked the shutdown experiments), but it confirms what I told you on a hunch: the infrasound even in the vicinity of the turbines is measured in microns. Did you notice they call it microseismology?
Now, micron-sized displacement at 10kHz is audible (and maybe even loud). There is a lot of energy in a 10kHz, one-micron wave. At 100Hz, you can’t hear it. It drowns in noise. You need wind-like air motion in your ear to hear 100 Hz. Notice the levels those fellows measured -160 .. -140 dB. They needed a correlator to reach that far below the noise level. There is no known mechanism in life to do that.
I can only conclude from these experiments that the only conceivable casualty of turbine infrasound are some dudes in bunkers listening to the goings-on on the other side of the planet. And even for them, it is not such a big trouble, it seems.
“If I were a horse, I would not want my feet to look like the one on the right:” Now of course if I was a horse ballerina I would be totally cool with that. 😉
Colorado Wellington says:
September 27, 2013 at 6:21 am
“And how would I evaluate the results if the test sample wouldn’t confess but grew crocked feet? I’m still working on it.” [what an overall riot, Colorado!]
But what, crocked heads and now crocked feet? Well then, who in the world is ever going to need Obamacare’s “free” Victory Gin in order to experience the Communist Utopia? Forget Nobel, move over, Karl Marx!
Industrial Wind Turbine Noise
High accuracy recorder.
If people want to do their own analysis I will point them at a sound recorded by a high quality Sony digital recorder with high quality microphones. I have the details on the equipment — it’s pretty good equipment.
Set your volume to 50% — works best with high quality headphones or a good speaker set with at least decent bass response.
https://soundcloud.com/soundmann-com/bird-song-vs-industrial-wind
I have run this one through my software and the infrasound is easily detected by my software. FFT/DFTFA is less likely to spot this due to the low frequencies. In MATLAB or OCTAVE the decimation function can be your friend if used once and once only — so that you can run through the entire sample in reasonable time.
Their may be a paper on this and similar recordings in the future.
Enjoy.
[I’m intrigued with the infrasonic noise issues, to the point of looking for low frequency microphones ($500, but assembled in a clean room and comes with calibration data) and wonder what it would take to make the sounds more comprehensible, e.g. frequency multiplying or fast play back. At a WHOI open house I heard a recording from a seismometer placed on the mid-Atlantic ridge played back at about 100X speed, and was impressed with how much it sounded like thunder from a squall line. -Ric]
As an Agricultural Scientist, horse owner, and trained ‘natural trim’ farrier, this looks like a long succession of bad trim jobs to me. Trims that have left excess heel while trimming for a long toe. Combine that with either trauma or too much rich feed and/or grazing and the inflammation and edema which develops in the hoof capsule leads to rotation of the coffin bone within the hoof capsule. It’s usually repairable with consistent and correct trimming of the hoof and keeping the animal in a paddock where it is forced to travel to get its vittles and drink. Horses aren’t meant to be kept in stalls or pens and not allowed to move about. Nor are their hooves meant to be bound by steel nailed to them.
The hoof functions as an integral part of [their] circulatory system and the movement and pressure created with each step moves nourishing blood through the innumerable capillaries of the hoof and forces it back up the leg toward the heart. Also, a hoof trimmed by either natural wear over the horses daily travels covering many miles (as they do in the wild) or trimmed into a shape which matches and mimics that of the wild horses’ hoof shape will encourage that intended function of the hoof. Unfortunately, many still hammer the steel on that was began in medeival times when war horses were forced to remain inside the castle standing in a fetid and infectious mess during seiges. They did just fine for the many millenia before domestication.
My own horses are trimmed to the wild horse model. Our oldest [wore] shoes for 8 years before my wife and I decided to give the natural trims a try. After a year of those trims, his chronic low grade lameness was gone. After two years, he became a gravel grinding machine with ne’er a misstep or ‘ouchie’ step on rough terrain.
I find the assertions made difficult to buy, but am willing to keep an open mind while I await confirmation by diplicated studies.
JPeden says:
September 27, 2013 at 6:23 am
Oops, it looks like Sparks has just barely beaten me to it, so that Sparks is going to be the next Nobel Peace Prize recipient..which may not be a good thing.
I would give the prize money to charity and some other good causes more deserving.
Ric says:
“I’m intrigued with the infrasonic noise issues, to the point of looking for low frequency microphones ($500, but assembled in a clean room and comes with calibration data) and wonder what it would take to make the sounds more comprehensible, e.g. frequency multiplying or fast play back. At a WHOI open house I heard a recording from a seismometer placed on the mid-Atlantic ridge played back at about 100X speed, and was impressed with how much it sounded like thunder from a squall line. -Ric]
If you are handy with electronics it is possible to build a detector, all you need is a LNB (Low Noise Block) a cheep dish tuner and an 18v power supply, an incoming signal is picked up and converted by the LNB to something closer to 1000 MHz, which can be used as an input to any sound card to then be visualized and recorded, I built one myself and wrote an oscilloscope program to locate hidden electronics behind walls that needed to be repaired.
Seems like a good place to tuck in this thought, since few will read this far down the comments, and it’s off-topic, but might be of interest to others:
When Willis ran his article about deep breathing the other day I found myself changing my breathing (experimenting) for a bit. As I did so, however, I also worried about the possibility of inducing a cold. About 40 years ago, I tried very deep breathing for 20-30 minutes and that night contracted a horrible cold. It was miserable enough that I linked the two events in my mind permanently.
Since that time, it’s happened at least twice again, but the severity of the cold wasn’t notable. Nonetheless, I wondered if the breathing exercises I was doing two days ago would induce a cold. That night, about 12 hours later, I began to experience the scratchy throat and runny nose that usually precedes a cold. Fortunately, the symptoms have abated and didn’t progress to a full-blown episode (so far, anyway.)
So, I’m curious, (sort of in the vein of Ric’s horse/windfarm question) whether anyone else noted such a relationship if they experimented with deep breathing after reading Willis’s post the other day?
Rod Everson: I’ve been experimenting with various breathing modes for three days now and I did get a runny nose this morning and now it’s kinda stuffy (I thought it was allergy). I wouldn’t jump to conclusions about cold though because that type of virus only binds to the tissues of the upper respiratory tract. So deep breathing is unlikely to have anything to do with it, but more vigorous breathing might — exposing the tissue and making it lose more water.
The farm should be cited for animal abuse.
Old England says:
September 27, 2013 at 4:21 am
Phlogiston says;.
Thanks for the clarification – and glad you are familiar with it – probably much more so that I am !
On the veterinary side – I am out of touch with the latest research nowadays – I was due to study veterinary at Cambridge (a very long time ago) but got sidetracked showjumping and teaching in Canada and the US. A cousin is responsible for managing the stallions and the breeding programme at what is probably the best known stud in ireland and maybe in the world – but he does not come across this condition at all.
If you are interested in low frequency / ultrasound from wind turbines here is a link to the Keele study I mentioned .
Thanks for the interesting link to the paper on wind turbine vibration and the Eskdalemuir MOD seismic center, very informative.
If you got in to do Vet Medicine at Cambridge you must be more intelligent than me – I considered Oxbridge briefly but went red-brick to study at Southampton Uni in the end.
A lot of the ultrasound and fracture research was in the 90s but here are 3 review like articles from 2001 (from Clinton Rubin) and 2007. The consensus is that LIPUS (low intensity pulsed ultrasound stimulation) is definitely effective but there remains uncertainty as to the mechanism. But hey – they still dont fully understand even how bisphosphonates work in bone either.
http://www.researchgate.net/publication/12114056_The_use_of_low-intensity_ultrasound_to_accelerate_the_healing_of_fractures/file/d912f50b3bdf965bc1.pdf
http://www.researchgate.net/publication/6853371_The_enhancement_of_bone_regeneration_by_ultrasound/file/50463516d613e45533.pdf
http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00776-006-1080-3 [paywalled, abstract only]
Well, it is a good piece of research in that it shows how people will assume linkage if they want it to exist.
Pachuri just did that this morning on BBC news “glaciers have receded, temperatures and sea level have risen, and the concentration of greenhouse gases has increased. He left it to the listener to make the connection, I guess because he still can’t prove it.
Come to think of it, I’ve had more gray hairs ever since I got an iPad…..must be some way to sue Apple for causing that……..
@ur momisugly Gary Hadlik re Rabit, Thanks I needed that, but be careful if PETA saw that no more fun for children any age. WAAAAAYYYY back when there was only one ( true, honest to God, yes just one) TV in the neighborhood we as children (for a penny no kidding) got to watch this on Saturday afternoons for 15 minutes at a time, never to be forgotten.