The Responses of Young Domestic Horses to Human-Given Cues.
Authors: Proops Leanne, Rayner Jenny, Taylor Anna M, McComb Karen
Journal: PloS one
Summary
# Editorial Summary: The Responses of Young Domestic Horses to Human-Given Cues Proops et al. (2013) investigated whether horses develop their apparent sensitivity to human communication innately or through experience by comparing how young horses (under three years) and adults responded to various human cues. Using two experimental approaches—one testing whether horses approached attentive people and another assessing their performance in object choice tasks—the researchers found striking developmental differences: whilst young horses could use obvious body orientation cues to identify attending humans, they failed with subtler signals like head turns and eye state, suggesting these nuanced attentional-reading skills require years of environmental exposure. Conversely, young horses performed similarly to adults in object choice tasks, successfully using markers, pointing and tactile cues but failing to respond to body orientation, gaze direction and elbow pointing—a pattern suggesting they learn generalised stimulus-response associations rather than acquiring specialised "human-reading" abilities. These findings challenge the popular theory that domestication has gifted horses with an innate advantage for interpreting human signals, instead indicating that horses' famed responsiveness to subtle cues develops gradually through experience, with implications for realistic expectations when working with younger animals and for designing effective training protocols that account for age-dependent learning capacities.
Read the full abstract on PubMed
Practical Takeaways
- •Young horses (under 3 years) will respond to obvious body orientation when being approached but won't reliably interpret more subtle signals like your eye gaze or head turns—expect to use clearer, larger movements when handling youngsters
- •Training young horses to respond to human cues is learnable and improves with experience, so consistent, repetitive training with clear markers (like pointing to objects or touching specific areas) works better than expecting them to read subtle communication
- •The inability to read subtle human cues in young horses is normal development, not a training failure—focus on explicit, consistent cue systems for both safety and efficiency in working with young stock
Key Findings
- •Young horses under three years old can use body orientation to identify attentive humans but cannot interpret subtle cues like head movement and eye state, unlike adults
- •Young horses perform similarly to adults in object choice tasks using marker placement, pointing and touching cues, but both age groups fail with body orientation, gaze, and tapping cues
- •Horses' ability to read subtle human attentional cues requires significant experience and develops with age rather than being innate
- •Horses' learning in object choice tasks appears to reflect general stimulus enhancement learning rather than a specialized 'human-reading' ability