Can Your Horse Recognise You

Can Your Horse Recognise You?

Obviously we all love our horses, and spend all our time and money on them, but is the feeling mutual, does a horse recognise you and care for you in the same manner. Do they run to you in the field, completely ignore a total stranger or run away from the vet, dentist of farrier.

Some may call this selective behaviour a coincidence, but many people do ask the question, can horses recognise different human`s. It is impossible for sure to know the answer to this question, but a number of studies have been carried out trying to explore the subject.

In 2012 a study was carried out by animal behaviourist Dr. Leanne Proops, seeing if a horse can combine visual and auditory cues to match a person`s face with their voice.

For the study, researchers had two people stand on either side of the horse. One person was familiar to the horse, and the other was a stranger. They then played a recording from a hidden speaker of either the familiar person`s voice or the stranger`s.

Their findings show that the horses often looked toward the familiar person when they heard that person`s voice. This indicated the horse recognized the voice and knew which human it belonged to.

This translates to outside the lab when you call your horse in the fields and your horse chooses to come to you, while they may ignore someone they do not know. Did you find this interesting, please share with your friends, take part in the discussion below via our comments section.