The effect of age and gender on the time taken for horses to learn an operant task

Abstract

The association between the age of a horse and their capacity for learning is understudied despite the large age range of horses used for both competition and leisure purposes in the UK and the considerable number of horses that swap over between different disciplines; for instance 4000 racehorse retire from racing each year and many go on to other careers including 900 each year going on to be polo ponies. A negative correlation between age and learning performance has been reported in test species to-date (Yagi et al., 1988); however relatively few studies have addressed this issue in equines (Madder & Price, 1980; Williams et al., 2004). The aim of the present study therefore was to investigate the association between a horse’s age and gender and the time taken to reach a pre-determined criterion during an operant learning task.