Horse Training Success

A fascinating tidbit for your Monday morning;

"Horses have the same ability to count as human infants, a study has shown. In tests the animals watched plastic apples being placed out of sight in buckets and then chose the one containing the larger number.
Using fake apples ensured they were not relying on their sense of smell to make the selection. Scientists said the horses showed they could keep a tally of how many apples were going into the containers, and hold the thought in their heads before deciding which bucket to investigate.

Their behaviour mirrored that seen in similar experiments involving human babies and wild rhesus macaque monkeys. In the baby study, infants watched cookies being placed in jars and crawled to the one with the most. The monkeys, in a colony on an island off Puerto Rico, went through the same routine with apples.

Horses were initially written off the list of animals with an apparent gift for maths after a horse called Clever Hans hoodwinked the scientific establishment in the late 1800s.

In the new study, Dr Claudia Uller and Jennifer Lewis from the University of Essex, conducted counting tests on 57 untrained horses belonging to local private owners and a riding school. Before the tests, the horses were allowed to nibble a small piece of real apple in order to get them interested. Then the real apples were replaced with fake ones all looking the same. In the first of a series of tests, two plastic apples were placed in one bucket and three in another. The containers were then held up at head levels so the horses could make a choice. Eleven out of 13 horses given this test selected the bucket containing three apples.

A second experiment followed the same pattern, but this time one bucket contained a single large apple and the other two smaller ones. Ten of the 12 horses tested chose the bucket holding the two apples. Dr Uller, who presented the findings at the British Psychological Society’s annual meeting in Dublin, and who rides horses, said: “The result absolutely proves that horses are more intelligent than people think.”"


Many horse people would no doubt agree with the idea that horses are more intelligent than what (most) people think. And while these results tell horse people what they probably already know, let's remember not to take it too far. A horse is still a horse and not a human. Anthropomorphising equine behavior will quickly get you into training difficulties with your horse. The intelligence level for counting described here is equivalent to a human INFANT (ie, 1 year or below). While it's fascinating to know that horses can count like (infant) humans, it's important to remember that just because we share this way of thinking in common, it does not mean that we share other ways of processing information or situations in common too.