A
ANIMAL
BEHAVIOUR
How
intelligent is
your horse?
BY JOAN KLEYNHANS-JORDAAN
According to EB Hanggi, at the
Equine Research Foundation
in Aptos, California, horses are
smarter than we think! They
can manage ordinary daily
cognitive tasks and mental
challenges quite well. Habituation
n nature, food and water sources are
of inconsistent quality and variable
distribution. Their predators change
location and habits. At the same time,
they need to deal with interactions in the
herd and learn and remember the identities
and roles of other individuals in the herd.
Life for a domesticated horse is even
more bewildering. In addition to dealing
with natural situations, they often live in
unsuitable environments, need to suppress
instinctual behaviours and learn tasks that Horses learn through habituation
throughout their lives. In a new
environment, they are very reactive and
pay attention to any stimulus perceived by
any of their senses. However, when certain
stimuli are insignificant and are repeated
regularly, the response diminishes.
Habituation is a simple form of learning, but
none the less important because it allows
non-vital information to be filtered out
subconsciously, enabling the horse to focus
on what is significant.
I
42 Plaastoe! July 2017
are not natural behaviour. They also need
to coexist with humans, who from a horse’s
viewpoint must be very strange indeed.
Research into the nature of cognition and
perception in horses is gradually providing
some fascinating insights.
When a horse is particularly sensitive
or fearful, either by his nature or through
learned experience, he can be desensitized.
Rough handling of the ears, or some
banging against the teeth may make a horse
extremely sensitive to being bridled, for
example. This leads to head shyness. Such a
horse needs to be retrained by approaching
his head in increments and retreating when
necessary until the horse willingly accepts
normal, gentle bridling.
Horses can become habituated and
desensitized to almost all overwhelming
stressors if this is done correctly. A good
trainer exposes horses in a positive manner
to all sorts of sights, sounds and contacts.
This can be done by leaving the horses
unrestrained in a safe corral and having
humans behaving strangely around them,
such as playing with bouncing beach balls,