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Hannah Tran
Professor Lynda Haas
Writing 39C
24 April 2016
Equestrian Emotion and Cognition
I will be attempting to review scientific works involving equestrian cognition and
emotion. The exploration into this field is relatively new, despite the fact that the human-horse
relationship goes back thousands of years. It has only been recently that more researchers have
started to take an interest in horse cognition. Prior to this period, there were only a handful of
researchers studying the ethology of horses, and the amount of data now compared to the amount
of data then is a vast gap.
With the development ethology in the 1970s, Irenus Eibl-Eibesfeldt, the founder of
human ethology, rarely wrote about horses, and not much was known about their cognition. One
of the earliest researchers that studied horses in their natural environment was James Feist, and
he himself wrote that there were no published articles about horses at the time. It wouldnt be
until the late 1980s and 1990s that more substantial research was done.
This review will start with the human-horse relationship, and the horses concept of
person. It will then go on to look over the equine facial coding system and facial evolution.
Finally, the equine cognitive and emotional state will be reviewed and see how this relates to
horse training.
Ultimately, this review will offer insight into equine cognitive and emotional abilities. If
our understanding of horses has evolved from the thought that they were just large, living
machines to conscience beings, then do humans have a duty to honor these emotions?

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People have been writing about horse riding as early as 3500-4500 years ago (Leblanc 1),
yet it has only been in the last couple decades that horse relationships with humans has been
thoroughly studied. Evelyn Hanggi, one of the leading researchers on horse cognition and the codirector of the Equine Research Foundation, was one of the first to conduct research solely on
horse cognition. In her article, The Thinking Horse: Cognition and Perception Reviewed, she
states how horses traditionally have rarely been classified as intelligent, but that this belief
runs counter to how they actually live. They are constantly adapting and foraging for food in
unknown environments, as well changing their behaviors to unnatural ones in order to appease
human conditions. Hanggi and her team employ a variety of stimuli tests on the horses to
measure their intelligence, and whenever negative reinforcement was used, the horses were more
prone to behave unpredictably and nervously. Nevertheless, the horses were still able to
complete multiple cognitive tests, such as those involving the size and location of objects.
However, Hanggi makes the distinction that this is not to say that horses possess the same
conceptualization abilities as humans, nonhuman primates, or other so-called advanced species,
but she does believe it is an indication that they possess more cognitive ability than what was
known (253)

Figure 1 Horse Conditioning, The Thinking Horse: Cognition

and Perception Reviewed

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Likewise, in Roles of Learning Theory and Ethology in Equitation by Paul McGreevy
and Andrew McLean, veterinary scientists at the University of Sydney, write further on equine
conditioning, and that many horse trainers are mistaken about how horses view them. These
trainers usually overlook kinship and affiliation and innate behaviors, important aspects in horse
domestication, and instead rely on a hierarchy and human leadership. McGreevy and McLean
claim this ideology is anthropocentric (113), and only leads to improper handling of horses.
Furthermore, horse cognition should not be dismissed, especially in regards to the
human-horse relationship, because there have been studies that have been leaning to the belief
that horses have are able to tell species apart, excluding their own. According to Martine
Hausberger, a leading researcher in the field of horse cognition, and his team of researchers at
the Universit De Rennes 1 in their article Do Horses Have a Concept of Person, horses have
the ability to recognize a familiar person from an unknown one through their voice and their
commands.
In this study, domesticated horses were given orders from familiar and unfamiliar voices.
The horses still follow the unknown voice, but they do not simply follow the order. For unknown
voices, they take longer to respond and respond differently depending on how the order was
given. For example, if the unknown person had their back turned, rather than looking directly at
the horse, the horse would have taken even longer to respond, However, this was untrue for
familiar voices, in which the data was similar across the board, even when the order was given
with their back facing towards the horses.. Regarding this, Hausberger even claims it was as if
they were surprised to hear the familiar order given by an unknown voice.

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Figure 2 Horse human recognition - bar graph, "Do Horses Have a Concept of
Person"

There is more to the human-horse relationship that is still being studies, but another piece
of critical information to come out during the last few years is the EquiFACS (Equine Facial
Action Coding System), developed by the researchers Jen Wathan, et al., specialists in animal
behavior and psychology at the University of Sussex. In this particular study, it was shown that
horse facial movements were similar to humans and primates, which was due to the fact that
horses contain similar facial muscles as humans. Understanding this can lead to an understanding
of horses and their emotional state.

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Figure 3 Horse-Human Facial similarities, " EquiFACS: The Equine Facial Action Coding System"

Because of these revelations in horse ethology, it is no wonder that researchers are

interested in delving into horses and their emotions. These studies point to such a thing in horses,
but as with many animals, measuring emotion is a difficult feat. Nevertheless, Hausberger and
his team set up to explore stress levels in horses, and even suggest using horses as an animal
model for depression.
In their article Could Work Be a Source of Behavioural Disorders? A Study in Horses,
they seek to find a correlation between work levels in domesticated horses and the amount of
stress a horse feels. It is no wonder that they arrived at this study, when, as previously
mentioned, researchers such as Hanggi and McLean found that positive reinforcement was better
for training horses and made them less anxious.

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Their hypothesis seems to lean towards being true and is linked to reinforcement. They
found that horses with more work, surrounded by negative reinforcement, and forced to suppress
natural physical and emotional behaviors became apathetic and developed stereotypical
behaviors. They displayed behavior that was abnormal and chronic, such as increased fear, and
ultimately led to what humans would call stress.

Figure 4 Withdrawn horses, "Towards an Ethological Animal Model of Depression? A Study on Horses"

In conclusion, there is still much to be done in the field of horse cognition. However, it
can be said that horses do indeed have a range of intelligence and emotion. Just how far this
range goes can only be said with future research, but it is important to not classify equine
cognition as unimportant. With that said, a question that lingers is whether anything will be done
with this information. It is clear that horses are not emotionless beings, but does it matter if they
are? With equine emotion in mind, will humans reconsider the conditions and ideologies behind
equestrianism?

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Works Cited
Feist, James D., and Dale R. Mccullough. "Behavior Patterns and Communication in Feral
Horses." Zeitschrift Fr Tierpsychologie 41.4 (1976): 337-71. ResearchGate. Web.
Fureix, Carole, Patrick Jego, Sverine Henry, La Lansade, and Martine Hausberger. "Towards
an Ethological Animal Model of Depression? A Study on Horses." PLoS ONE 7.6
(2012): n. pag. University of Sussex. Web. 20 Apr. 2016.
Hanggi, Evelyn. "The Thinking Horse: Cognition and Perception Reviewed." AAEP Proceedings
51 (2005): 246-55. ResearchGate. Web. 24 Apr. 2016.
Hausberger, Martine, Emmanuel Gautier, Vronique Biquand, Christophe Lunel, and Patrick
Jgo. "Could Work Be a Source of Behavioural Disorders? A Study in Horses." PLoS
ONE 4.10 (2009): n. pag. Universit De Rennes 1. Web. 20 Apr. 2016.
Leblanc, Michel-Antoine. The Mind of the Horse: An Introduction to Equine Cognition.
Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2013. Print.
Leblanc, Michel-Antoine, and Patrick Duncan. "Can Studies of Cognitive Abilities and of Life in
the Wild Really Help Us to Understand Equine Learning?" Behavioural Processes 76.1
(2007): 49-52. ScienceDirect. Web.
McGreevy, Paul D., and Andrew N. Mclean. "Roles of Learning Theory and Ethology in
Equitation." Journal of Veterinary Behavior: Clinical Applications and Research 2.4
(2007): 108-18. ResearchGate. Web. 24 Apr. 2016.
Sankey, Carol, Sverine Henry, Nicolas Andr, Marie-Annick Richard-Yris, and Martine
Hausberger. "Do Horses Have a Concept of Person?" PLOS ONE. Universit De Rennes
1, 30 Mar. 2011. Web. 20 Apr. 2016.
Wathan, Jen, Anne M. Burrows, Bridget M. Waller, and Karen Mccomb. "EquiFACS: The

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Equine Facial Action Coding System." PLOS ONE PLoS ONE 10.8 (2015): n. pag.
University of Sussex 1. Web. 20 Apr. 2016.