Horses can plan ahead and think strategically, scientists find

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 interests.

Now, research by equine scientists suggests the use of this phrase has been inadvertently maligning horses for centuries.

Horses have the ability to think and plan ahead and are far more intelligent than scientists previously thought, according to a Nottingham Trent University study that analysed the animal’s responses to a reward-based game.

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The horses cannily adapted their approach to the game to get the most treats – while making the least effort.

“Previously, research has suggested that horses simply respond to stimuli in the moment, they don’t 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 the lead researcher, Louise Evans.

The three-stage game involved 20 horses, who were initially rewarded with a treat merely for touching a piece of card with their noses. Then, in the second stage, researchers started switching on a “stop light”. The horses were only given a snack if they touched the card while the stop light was off.

At first, they ignored the light and carried on indiscriminately touching the card, regardless of whether or not the light was on.

But when, in the third stage, researchers introduced a penalty for touching the card while the stop light was on – a 10 second timeout during which the horses could not play the game at all – the team found there was a sudden and highly significant reduction in errors by all the equine participants. The horses started correctly touching the card only at the right time to get a treat.

“That timeout was enough to immediately get the performance out of them that we wanted,” said Evans. “That was enough for the horses to go: ‘OK, let’s just play by the rules.’”

Instantly switching strategies in this way indicates horses have a higher level of cognitive reasoning than previously thought possible. It suggests that, rather than failing to grasp the tenets of the game, the horses had understood the rules the whole time but, astutely, had not seen any need to pay much attention to them in the second stage.

“When there was a timeout for getting something wrong, they switched on and started paying attention,” said Evans. This behaviour 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 this.

Evans hopes the groundbreaking study, which will be published in the journal Applied Animal Behaviour Science, will help to improve welfare for horses. “Generally, when we start to think that animals may have better cognitive abilities than previously thought, their welfare does improve. 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.”