Horses may learn by ‘eavesdropping’ on humans’ interaction with each other, study finds

Horses may learn socially by “eavesdropping” on human behaviour, a study has found.

A team of researchers from universities in Germany and Scotland concluded that horses may change their feeding strategies having witnessed human-to-human demonstrations, even if the demonstrators are not present.

The pilot study, led by zoologist and behaviour researcher Konstanze Krueger, involved 17 horses, aged four to 28, at five private yards. The horses were allowed to watch a human participant take pieces of carrot from two buckets; when taking it from one, another human would convey approval as they would to a horse, using body language and a firm “no” or similar. When they took it from the other bucket, the other human would convey disapproval, also via stance and tone of voice. The horses watched this six times, then were allowed back in to choose which bucket to feed from. They had previously become used to eating from both buckets in the test area.

“In this study, 12 of 17 horses significantly changed their preference for a feeding location after observing approval in a human-human interaction there,” the researchers said.

The horses involved were kept differently; 14 lived in “social housing”, in open stabling, three in individual housing, two in “paddock boxes” and one in a single box with turnout.

The team found that those kept in social housing adapted in a higher percentage of trials to human-human demonstrations than those in individual housing.

“This indicates, for the first time, that some animals change their feeding strategies after eavesdropping on human-human demonstrations and that this adaptation may be dependent on social experience,” the team said. Some of the demonstrators were more familiar to the horses than others, and some had more impact on the horses’ performance than others.

“Future research should further investigate the durability of this preference change in the absence of repeated demonstrations, and establish whether long-term social learning sets in. This would have important implications for unintentional long-term impacts of human interactions on interspecies communication.”

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