The old English proverb “you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink” has been used since the 16th century to describe the difficulty of getting someone to act in their own best interest.
Now, research by equine scientists suggests that the use of this phrase has inadvertently angered horses for centuries.
Horses have the ability to think ahead and plan and are much more intelligent than scientists previously thought, according to a study from Nottingham Trent University that analyzed the animal’s responses to a reward-based game.
The horses have skillfully adapted their approach to the game to get the most treats – while putting in the least amount of effort.
“Previously, research suggested that horses simply react to stimuli in the moment, they do not proactively look ahead, think ahead and plan their actions – whereas our study shows that they do have an awareness of the consequences and outcomes of their actions,” said lead researcher Louise Evans.
The three-phase game involved 20 horses, which were initially rewarded with a treat simply for touching a piece of card with their noses. Then, in the second phase, researchers began to turn on a “stop light.” The horses only got a snack if they touched the card while the stoplight was off.
At first, they ignored the light and continued to touch the card indiscriminately, regardless of whether the light was on or not.
But when, in the third phase, researchers introduced a penalty for touching the card while the stoplight was on—a 10-second period during which the horses could not play the game at all—the team found that there was a sudden and highly significant reduction was in errors by all the horse participants. The horses started touching the card just in time to get a treat.
“That timeout was enough to immediately get the performance out of them that we wanted,” Evans said. “That was enough for the horses to go, ‘OK, let’s just play by the rules’.”
Instantaneous switching of strategies in this way suggests that horses have a higher level of cognitive reasoning than previously thought possible. This suggests that, rather than not understanding the principles of the game, the horses understood the rules all along but, shrewdly, did not see the need to pay much attention to them in the second phase. .
“When there was a time to get something wrong, they turned on and started paying attention,” Evans said. This behavior requires the horse to think into the future, researchers say, and is very goal-directed, with horses required to focus on what they want to achieve and the steps they need to take to do it.
Evans hopes the ground-breaking study, which will be published in the journal Applied Animal Behavior Science, will help improve horse welfare. “In general, when we start to think that animals might have better cognitive abilities than previously thought, their well-being improves. But also, what we’ve shown is that in training you really don’t need to use aversive methods or anything too harsh to get really good performance out of horses.”
