Abstract
Due to our long history of living in close association with horses, these animals are suggested to have enhanced skills in understanding and communicating with humans. Today, horses have become important to humans for sport and leisure and their understanding of human behaviour and their human-directed behaviour are therefore of great importance. In this study, we investigated 22 horses in a human contact-seeking experiment where they were presented with an unsolvable problem and a detour experiment with a human demonstrator. The unsolvable problem consisted of pieces of carrot in a closed bucket and the detour resembled the shape of V. Additionally, personality traits of the participating horses were assessed. Interestingly, the full-sized horses (N = 11) showed more human-related behaviours when presented with an unsolvable problem compared to before the carrots were made unreachable (p = 0.033), while the ponies (N = 11) did not. However, neither the full-sized horses nor the ponies were significantly more successful in the detour after human demonstrations than in control trials. When comparing the two experiments, we found the task-oriented behaviour in the detour test to positively correlate with human proximity and eye contact-seeking behaviour towards humans during the unsolvable problem in the contact-seeking test. Interestingly, again this was only true for the full-sized horses (p < 0.05) and not for the ponies. From the horse personality questionnaire results, the traits excitability and anxiousness revealed strong negative correlations with human-directed behaviour in the contact-seeking experiment (p < 0.05). Hence, size (full-sized horse/pony) and personality influenced the human-related behaviours of the horses and we suggest a future focus on these aspects to deepen our understanding of human–horse communication.
Highlights
Domestic animals, such as the horse (Equus caballus), have been living in close association with humans for thousands of years (Clutton-Brock 1981)
We compared phase 1 with phase 2 in the test, i.e. the change in behaviour when the carrots were put in the food bucket. It was only the full-sized horses, and not the ponies, that revealed a significant increase of human proximity (N = 11, Z = − 2.13, p = 0.033) and tended to look more towards human (N = 11, Z = − 1.89, p = 0.059) in phase 2 compared to phase 1
We found significant differences in human-directed behaviours between full-sized horses and ponies
Summary
Domestic animals, such as the horse (Equus caballus), have been living in close association with humans for thousands of years (Clutton-Brock 1981). Research has suggested that domestic animals have human-directed social skills that are not found in their wild ancestors. This has been investigated in comparative studies between dogs and wolves. It is well established that dogs, contrarily to wolves, seek human contact when faced with a problem (Miklósi et al 2003). This ability is evident at a young age and is age and breed dependent (Passalacqua et al 2011; Sundman et al 2017). In this study we will investigate the interspecies communication abilities of the domestic horse
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