(c) Compassion/Ed Posposil

As reported in the Daily Telegraph, the story of Clever Hans inspired Dr Claudia Uller, of the University of Essex, to investigate whether horses can count. 

Dr Claudia Uller and Jennifer Lewis carried out experiments using 57 untrained horses belonging to local private owners and a local riding school.  Before the tests, the horses were allowed to nibble a small piece of real apple in to get them interested in the activity. In the experiments, real apples were replaced with fake apples so that the horses would not be influenced by their sense of smell.

In each test, the horses watched plastic apples being dropped out of sight into buckets.  In the first test, two plastic apples were placed in one bucket and three in another.  The buckets were held up at head level so that horses could choose one. Eleven out of thirteen horses selected the bucket containing three apples, which suggests that the horses understood which bucket had the larger number of apples in it.

The second experiment followed the same pattern, but this time one bucket contained two small apples and the other contained a single large apple with double the surface area. Again the horses chose the bucket with the greater the number of apples – ten out of the twelve horses tested chose the bucket holding the two apples.

The horses were able to keep a tally of how many apples were going into each bucket, and hold this information in their heads before deciding which bucket to investigate.  This tendency to opt for containers holding larger numbers of food items has also been seen in non-human primates such as rhesus macaques and lemurs.  Baby chicks of only 3 or 4 days old can add and subtract too. Human babies develop this ability at about ten months of age.

Although horses may not be able to count in the same way that humans do, this study demonstrates that they do understand the concept of ‘greater or fewer’, and that horses are certainly more intelligent than people may have previously thought.

More about horses’ abilities, behaviour and welfare
See our blog article on the fascinating report about horses written specially for Compassion by animal welfare consultant Heather Pickett.

Sources
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/science-news/3338537/Horses-can-count-new-study-says.html
http://www.breakingnews.ie/world/mhojgbaucwid/

Animal welfare consultant Heather Pickett has written a special article for our animal sentience pages. It’s a fascinating  read  about  horses’ behaviour, cognitive abilities (such as ‘thinking’) and welfare needs.  Horses have remarkably complex social lives; with membership of a herd being of ultimate importance to them and sometimes roaming for up to 80km in one day. They are great diplomats, able to resolve many conflicts in order to keep the herd together.

Self reflection. Copyright Compassion/ Ed Posposil

Mares often form lifetime relationships, spending most of their time together. Their foals often become good friends too as a result. They have remarkable memory skills and have even been shown to understand that a 3-D image can be shown in a photograph. For example, horses had been trained to have a ‘favourite’ object (for example a soft toy or a frisbee), using treats as positive reinforcement. Then they were shown photos of a range of things, including their ‘favoured toy’, and more often than not they would choose the photo of that toy. In a similar experiment (Stone 2009), horses were found to be able to tell the difference between photos of people, even identical twins!

Domesticated horses are often kept stabled alone and fed on concentrated food that is eaten quickly, rather than grazing the whole day as they would do in more natural conditions. These factors sometimes lead to destructive behaviours such as weaving, biting the stable doors and pacing. The occurrence of these unnatural behaviours illustrates that horses, just like many other animals, need an environment that more closely fits their needs and fully takes into account their sentience and intelligence.

Download the full article Pickett, H. (2009) ‘Horses: Their Behaviour, Mental Abilities and Welfare’. animalsentience.com
Shorter version also available

Reference: Stone, S. M. (2009) Human facial discrimination in horses: can they tell us apart?  Animal Cognition, Online first.

Clever Hans

At the time, people thought he was working out the maths himself, and were disappointed to learn that he was reading their body language instead. But the fact that Hans could answer the questions by this method is in itself amazing. He was seeing small changes in the behaviour of his questioners which people did not see – and it took an extensive experiment for us to find out what Hans knew all along.

Other animals are also more tuned in to us than we might expect. In a previous post about Sociable sheep we found out that sheep preferred the faces of smiling people rather than stressed or angry people.

This leads us to consider, how much do animals really know about what we’re thinking?

Sources:
Clever Hans (BBC website)
McGreevy (2004) Equine Behaviour: A Guide for Veterinarians and Equine Scientists.